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THE HISTORY OF ROME, BOOK V

The Establishment of the Military Monarchy

by

THEODOR MOMMSEN

Translated with the Sanction of the Author

by

William Purdie Dickson, D.D., LL.D.
Professor of Divinity in the University of Glasgow

A New Edition Revised throughout and Embodying Recent Additions






Preparer's Notes

This work contains many literal citations of and references to words,
sounds, and alphabetic symbols drawn from many languages, including
Gothic and Phoenician, but chiefly Latin and Greek.  This English
language Gutenberg edition, constrained within the scope of 7-bit
ASCII code, adopts the following orthographic conventions:

1) Words and phrases regarded as "foreign imports", italicized
in the original text published in 1903; but which in the intervening
century have become "naturalized" into English; words such as "de jure",
"en masse", etc. are not given any special typographic distinction.

2) Except for Greek, all literally cited non-English words that do not
refer to texts cited as academic references, words that in the source
manuscript appear italicized, are rendered with a single preceding,
and a single following dash; thus, -xxxx-.

3) Greek words, first transliterated into Roman alphabetic equivalents,
are rendered with a preceding and a following double-dash; thus, --xxxx--.
Note that in some cases the root word itself is a compound form such as
xxx-xxxx, and is rendered as --xxx-xxx--

4) Simple non-ideographic references to vocalic sounds, single letters,
or alphabeic dipthongs; and prefixes, suffixes, and syllabic references
are represented by a single preceding dash; thus, -x, or -xxx.

5) The following refers particularly to the complex discussion
of alphabetic evolution in Ch. XIV: Measuring and Writing).  Ideographic
references, meaning pointers to the form of representation itself rather
than to its content, are represented as -"id:xxxx"-.  "id:" stands for
"ideograph", and indicates that the reader should form a mental picture
based on the "xxxx" following the colon.  "xxxx" may represent a single
symbol, a word, or an attempt at a picture composed of ASCII characters.
E. g. --"id:GAMMA gamma"-- indicates an uppercase Greek gamma-form
Followed by the form in lowercase.  Such exotic parsing  is necessary
to explain alphabetic development because a single symbol
may have been used for a number of sounds in a number of languages,
or even for a number of sounds in the same language at different
times.  Thus, -"id:GAMMA gamma" might very well refer to a Phoenician
construct that in appearance resembles the form that eventually
stabilized as an uppercase Greek "gamma" juxtaposed to another one
of lowercase.  Also, a construct such as --"id:E" indicates a symbol
that in graphic form most closely resembles an ASCII uppercase "E",
but, in fact, is actually drawn more crudely.

6) The numerous subheading references, of the form "XX. XX. Topic"
found in the appended section of endnotes are to be taken as "proximate"
rather than topical indicators.  That is, the information contained
in the endnote indicates primarily the location in the main text
of the closest indexing "handle", a subheading, which may or may not
echo congruent subject matter.

The reason for this is that in the translation from an original
paged manuscript to an unpaged "cyberscroll", page numbers are lost.
In this edition subheadings are the only remaining indexing "handles"
of sub-chapter scale.  Unfortunately, in some stretches of text these
subheadings may be as sparse as merely one in three pages.  Therefore,
it would seem to make best sense to save the reader time and temper
by adopting a shortest path method to indicate the desired reference.

7) The attentive reader will notice occasional typographic or syntactic
anomalies and errors.  In almost all cases this conscious and due to
an editorial decision for the first Gutenberg edition to transmit
transparently all but the most egregious flaws found in the source text
Scribner edition of 1903.  Furthermore, a number of sentences may be
virtually unintelligible to the English reader due to the architecture
of relative clauses, prepositions, and verbs as carried over
from the original German.  It is the preparer's ambition for a second
Gutenberg edition of the History of Rome to reconstruct and clarify
the most turgid specimens.

8) Dr. Mommsen has given his dates in terms of Roman usage, A.U.C.;
that is, from the founding of Rome, conventionally taken to be 753 B. C.
To the end of each volume is appended a table of conversion between
the two systems.




CONTENTS

BOOK V:  The Establishment of the Military Monarchy

   CHAPTER

      I. Marcus Lepidus and Quintus Sertorius

     II. Rule of the Sullan Restoration

    III. The Fall of the Oligarchy and the Rule of Pompeius

     IV. Pompeius and the East

      V. The Struggle of Parties during the Absence of Pompeius

     VI. Retirement of Pompeius and Coalition of the Pretenders

    VII. The Subjugation of the West

   VIII. The Joint Rule of Pompeius and Caesar

     IX. Death of Crassus--Rupture between the Joint Rulers

      X. Brundisium, Ilerda, Pharsalus, and Thapsus

     XI. The Old Republic and the New Monarchy

    XII. Religion, Culture, Literature, and Art




BOOK FIFTH

The Establishment of the Military Monarchy




Wie er sich sieht so um und um,
Kehrt es ihm fast den Kopf herum,
Wie er wollt' Worte zu allem finden?
Wie er mocht' so viel Schwall verbinden?
Wie er mocht' immer muthig bleiben
So fort und weiter fort zu schreiben?

Goethe.




Chapter I

Marcus Lepidus and Quintus Sertorius

The Opposition
Jurists
Aristocrats Friendly to Reform
Democrats

When Sulla died in the year 676, the oligarchy which he had
restored ruled with absolute sway over the Roman state; but,
as it had been established by force, it still needed force
to maintain its ground against its numerous secret and open foes.
It was opposed not by any single party with objects clearly
expressed and under leaders distinctly acknowledged, but by a mass
of multifarious elements, ranging themselves doubtless
under the general name of the popular party, but in reality opposing
the Sullan organization of the commonwealth on very various grounds
and with very different designs.  There were the men of positive
law who neither mingled in nor understood politics, but who detested
the arbitrary procedure of Sulla in dealing with the lives
and property of the burgesses.  Even during Sulla's lifetime,
when all other opposition was silent, the strict jurists resisted
the regent; the Cornelian laws, for example, which deprived various
Italian communities of the Roman franchise, were treated
in judicial decisions as null and void; and in like manner the courts
held that, where a burgess had been made a prisoner of war and sold
into slavery during the revolution, his franchise was not forfeited.
There was, further, the remnant of the old liberal minority
in the senate, which in former times had laboured to effect
a compromise with the reform party and the Italians, and was now
in a similar spirit inclined to modify the rigidly oligarchic
constitution of Sulla by concessions to the Populares.
There were, moreover, the Populares strictly so called,
the honestly credulous narrow-minded radicals, who staked property
and life for the current watchwords of the party-programme,
only to discover with painful surprise after the victory
that they had been fighting not for a reality, but for a phrase.
Their special aim was to re-establish the tribunician power, which Sulla
had not abolished but had divested of its most essential prerogatives,
and which exercised over the multitude a charm all the more mysterious,
because the institution had no obvious practical use and was
in fact an empty phantom--the mere name of tribune of the people,
more than a thousand years later, revolutionized Rome.

Transpadanes
Freedmen
Capitalists
Proletarians of the Capital
The Dispossessed
The Proscribed and Their Adherents

There were, above all, the numerous and important classes
whom the Sullan restoration had left unsatisfied, or whose political
or private interests it had directly injured.  Among those
who for such reasons belonged to the opposition ranked the dense
and prosperous population of the region between the Po and the Alps,
which naturally regarded the bestowal of Latin rights in 665(1)
as merely an instalment of the full Roman franchise, and so afforded
a ready soil for agitation.  To this category belonged also
the freedmen, influential in numbers and wealth, and specially
dangerous through their aggregation in the capital, who could
not brook their having been reduced by the restoration to their
earlier, practically useless, suffrage.  In the same position
stood, moreover, the great capitalists, who maintained a cautious
silence, but still as before preserved their tenacity of resentment
and their equal tenacity of power.  The populace of the capital,
which recognized true freedom in free bread-corn, was likewise
discontented.  Still deeper exasperation prevailed among
the burgess-bodies affected by the Sullan confiscations--whether
they like those of Pompeii, lived on their property curtailed
by the Sullan colonists, within the same ring-wall with the latter,
and at perpetual variance with them; or, like the Arretines
and Volaterrans, retained actual possession of their territory,
but had the Damocles' sword of confiscation suspended over them
by the Roman people; or, as was the case in Etruria especially,
were reduced to be beggars in their former abodes, or robbers
in the woods.  Finally, the agitation extended to the whole family
connections and freedmen of those democratic chiefs who had lost
their lives in consequence of the restoration, or who were wandering
along the Mauretanian coasts, or sojourning at the court
and in the army of Mithradates, in all the misery of emigrant exile;
for, according to the strict family-associations that governed
the political feeling of this age, it was accounted a point of honour(2)
that those who were left behind should endeavour to procure for exiled
relatives the privilege of returning to their native land, and,
in the case of the dead, at least a removal of the stigma attaching
to their memory and to their children, and a restitution to the latter
of their paternal estate.  More especially the immediate children
of the proscribed, whom the regent had reduced in point of law
to political Pariahs,(3) had thereby virtually received from the law
itself a summons to rise in rebellion against the existing
order of things.

Men of Ruined Fortunes
Men of Ambition

To all these sections of the opposition there was added the whole
body of men of ruined fortunes.  All the rabble high and low,
whose means and substance had been spent in refined or in vulgar
debauchery; the aristocratic lords, who had no farther mark
of quality than their debts; the Sullan troopers whom the regent's
fiat could transform into landholders but not into husbandmen,
and who, after squandering the first inheritance of the proscribed,
were longing to succeed to a second--all these waited only
the unfolding of the banner which invited them to fight against
the existing order of things, whatever else might be inscribed on it.
From a like necessity all the aspiring men of talent, in search
of popularity, attached themselves to the opposition; not only
those to whom the strictly closed circle of the Optimates denied
admission or at least opportunities for rapid promotion,
and who therefore attempted to force their way into the phalanx
and to break through the laws of oligarchic exclusiveness and seniority
by means of popular favour, but also the more dangerous men,
whose ambition aimed at something higher than helping to determine
the destinies of the world within the sphere of collegiate intrigues.
On the advocates' platform in particular--the only field of legal
opposition left open by Sulla--even in the regent's lifetime
such aspirants waged lively war against the restoration with the weapons
of formal jurisprudence and combative oratory: for instance,
the adroit speaker Marcus Tullius Cicero (born 3rd January 648),
son of a landholder of Arpinum, speedily made himself a name
by the mingled caution and boldness of his opposition to the dictator.
Such efforts were not of much importance, if the opponent desired
nothing farther than by their means to procure for himself a curule
chair, and then to sit in it in contentment for the rest of his life.
No doubt, if this chair should not satisfy a popular man
and Gaius Gracchus should find a successor, a struggle for life
or death was inevitable; but for the present at least no name could
be mentioned, the bearer of which had proposed to himself
any such lofty aim.

Power of the Opposition

Such was the sort of opposition with which the oligarchic government
instituted by Sulla had to contend, when it had, earlier than
Sulla himself probably expected, been thrown by his death
on its own resources.  The task was in itself far from easy, and it
was rendered more difficult by the other social and political evils
of this age--especially by the extraordinary double difficulty
of keeping the military chiefs in the provinces in subjection
to the supreme civil magistracy, and of dealing with the masses
of the Italian and extra-Italian populace accumulating in the capital,
and of the slaves living there to a great extent in de facto freedom,
without having troops at disposal.  The senate was placed
as it were, in a fortress exposed and threatened on all sides,
and serious conflicts could not fail to ensue.  But the means
of resistance organized by Sulla were considerable and lasting;
and although the majority of the nation was manifestly disinclined
to the government which Sulla had installed, and even animated
by hostile feelings towards it, that government might very well
maintain itself for a long time in its stronghold against
the distracted and confused mass of an opposition which was not agreed
either as to end or means, and, having no head, was broken up
into a hundred fragments.  Only it was necessary that it should
be determined to maintain its position, and should bring
at least a spark of that energy, which had built the fortress,
to its defence; for in the case of a garrison which will not
defend itself, the greatest master of fortification constructs
his walls and moats in vain.

Want of Leaders
Coterie-Systems

The more everything ultimately depended on the personality
of the leading men on both sides, it was the more unfortunate
that both, strictly speaking, lacked leaders.  The politics of
thisperiod were thoroughly under the sway of the coterie-system
in its worst form.  This, indeed, was nothing new; close unions
of families and clubs were inseparable from an aristocratic
organizationof the state, and had for centuries prevailed in Rome.
But it was not till this epoch that they became all-powerful,
for it was only now (first in 690) that their influence was attested
rather than checked by legal measures of repression.

All persons of quality, those of popular leanings no less than
the oligarchy proper, met in Hetaeriae; the mass of the burgesses
likewise, so far as they took any regular part in political events
at all, formed according to their voting-districts close unions
with an almost military organization, which found their natural
captains and agents in the presidents of the districts, "tribe-
distributors" (-divisores tribuum-).  With these political clubs
everything was bought and sold; the vote of the elector especially,
but also the votes of the senator and the judge, the fists too
which produced the street riot, and the ringleaders who directed
it--the associations of the upper and of the lower ranks
were distinguished merely in the matter of tariff.  The Hetaeria
decided the elections, the Hetaeria decreed the impeachments,
the Hetaeria conducted the defence; it secured the distinguished
advocate, and in case of need it contracted for an acquittal
with one of the speculators who pursued on a great scale lucrative
dealings in judges' votes.  The Hetaeria commanded by its compact bands
the streets of the capital, and with the capital but too often the state.
All these things were done in accordance with a certain rule,
and, so to speak, publicly; the system of Hetaeriae was better organized
and managed than any branch of state administration; although there was,
as is usual among civilized swindlers, a tacit understanding
that there should be no direct mention of the nefarious proceedings,
nobody made a secret of them, and advocates of repute were not ashamed
to give open and intelligible hints of their relation to the Hetaeriae
of their clients.  If an individual was to be found here or there
who kept aloof from such doings and yet did not forgo public life,
he was assuredly, like Marcus Cato, a political Don Quixote.
Parties and party-strife were superseded by the clubs and their rivalry;
government was superseded by intrigue.  A more than equivocal
character, Publius Cethegus, formerly one of the most zealous
Marians, afterwards as a deserter received into favour by Sulla,(4)
acted a most influential part in the political doings
of this period--unrivalled as a cunning tale-bearer and mediator
between the sections of the senate, and as having a statesman's
acquaintance with the secrets of all cabals: at times the appointment
to the most important posts of command was decided by a word
from his mistress Praecia.  Such a plight was only possible
where none of the men taking part in politics rose above mediocrity:
any man of more than ordinary talent would have swept away
this system of factions like cobwebs; but there was in reality
the saddest lack of men of political or military capacity.

Phillipus
Metellus, Catulus, the Luculli

Of the older generation the civil wars had left not a single man
of repute except the old shrewd and eloquent Lucius Philippus (consul
in 663), who, formerly of popular leanings,(5) thereafter leader
of the capitalist party against the senate,(6) and closely associated
with the Marians,(7) and lastly passing over to the victorious
oligarchy in sufficient time to earn thanks and commendation,(8)
had managed to escape between the parties.  Among the men
of the following generation the most notable chiefs of the pure
aristocracy were Quintus Metellus Pius (consul in 674), Sulla's
comrade in dangers and victories; Quintus Lutatius Catulus, consul
in the year of Sulla's death, 676, the son of the victor of Vercellae;
and two younger officers, the brothers Lucius and Marcus Lucullus,
of whom the former had fought with distinction under Sulla
in Asia, the latter in Italy; not to mention Optimates like Quintus
Hortensius (640-704), who had importance only as a pleader,
or men like Decimus Junius Brutus (consul in 677), Mamercus
Aemilius Lepidus Livianus (consul in 677), and other such nullities,
whose best quality was a euphonious aristocratic name.
But even those four men rose little above the average calibre
of the Optimates of this age.  Catulus was like his father a man of
refined culture and an honest aristocrat, but of moderate talents
and, in particular, no soldier.  Metellus was not merely estimable
in his personal character, but an able and experienced officer;
and it was not so much on account of his close relations as a kinsman
and colleague with the regent as because of his recognized ability
that he was sent in 675, after resigning the consulship, to Spain,
where the Lusitanians and the Roman emigrants under Quintus
Sertorius were bestirring themselves afresh.  The two Luculli
were also capable officers--particularly the elder, who combined
very respectable military talents with thorough literary culture
and leanings to authorship, and appeared honourable also as a man.
But, as statesmen, even these better aristocrats were not much less
remiss and shortsighted than the average senators of the time.
In presence of an outward foe the more eminent among them, doubtless,
proved themselves useful and brave; but no one of them evinced
the desire or the skill to solve the problems of politics proper,
and to guide the vessel of the state through the stormy sea of intrigues
and factions as a true pilot.  Their political wisdom was limited
to a sincere belief in the oligarchy as the sole means of salvation,
and to a cordial hatred and courageous execration of demagogism
as well as of every individual authority which sought to emancipate
itself.  Their petty ambition was contented with little.
The stories told of Metellus in Spain--that he not only allowed
himself to be delighted with the far from harmonious lyre
of the Spanish occasional poets, but even wherever he went had himself
received like a god with libations of wine and odours of incense,
and at table had his head crowned by descending Victories amidst
theatrical thunder with the golden laurel of the conqueror--
are no better attested than most historical anecdotes; but even
such gossip reflects the degenerate ambition of the generations
of Epigoni.  Even the better men were content when they had gained
not power and influence, but the consulship and a triumph
and a place of honour in the senate; and at the very time
when with right ambition they would have just begun to be truly useful
to their country and their party, they retired from the political stage
to be lost in princely luxury.  Men like Metellus and Lucius Lucullus
were, even as generals, not more attentive to the enlargement
of the Roman dominion by fresh conquests of kings and peoples than
to the enlargement of the endless game, poultry, and dessert lists
of Roman gastronomy by new delicacies from Africa and Asia Minor,
and they wasted the best part of their lives in more or less ingenious
idleness.  The traditional aptitude and the individual self-denial,
on which all oligarchic government is based, were lost
in the decayed and artificially restored Roman aristocracy of this age;
in its judgment universally the spirit of clique was accounted
as patriotism, vanity as ambition, and narrow-mindedness as consistency.
Had the Sullan constitution passed into the guardianship of men
such as have sat in the Roman College of Cardinals or the Venetian
Council of Ten, we cannot tell whether the opposition would have been able
to shake it so soon; with such defenders every attack involved,
at all events, a serious peril.

Pompeius

Of the men, who were neither unconditional adherents nor open
opponents of the Sullan constitution, no one attracted more the eyes
of the multitude than the young Gnaeus Pompeius, who was at the time
of Sulla's death twenty-eight years of age (born 29th September 648).
The fact was a misfortune for the admired as well as
for the admirers; but it was natural.  Sound in body and mind,
a capable athlete, who even when a superior officer vied with his
soldiers in leaping, running, and lifting, a vigorous and skilled
rider and fencer, a bold leader of volunteer bands, the youth had
become Imperator and triumphator at an age which excluded him
from every magistracy and from the senate, and had acquired
the first place next to Sulla in public opinion; nay, had obtained
from the indulgent regent himself--half in recognition, half in irony--
the surname of the Great.  Unhappily, his mental endowments by no means
corresponded with these unprecedented successes.  He was neither
a bad nor an incapable man, but a man thoroughly ordinary, created
by nature to be a good sergeant, called by circumstances to be
a general and a statesman.  An intelligent, brave and experienced,
thoroughly excellent soldier, he was still, even in his military
capacity, without trace of any higher gifts.  It was characteristic
of him as a general, as well as in other respects, to set to work
with a caution bordering on timidity, and, if possible, to give
the decisive blow only when he had established an immense superiority
over his opponent.  His culture was the average culture of the time;
although entirely a soldier, he did not neglect, when he went
to Rhodes, dutifully to admire, and to make presents to,
the rhetoricians there.  His integrity was that of a rich man
who manages with discretion his considerable property inherited
and acquired.  He did not disdain to make money in the usual senatorial
way, but he was too cold and too rich to incur special risks,
or draw down on himself conspicuous disgrace, on that account.
The vice so much in vogue among his contemporaries, rather than
any virtue of his own, procured for him the reputation--comparatively,
no doubt, well warranted--of integrity and disinterestedness.
His "honest countenance" became almost proverbial, and even after
his death he was esteemed as a worthy and moral man; he was in fact
a good neighbour, who did not join in the revolting schemes
by which the grandees of that age extended the bounds of their domains
through forced sales or measures still worse at the expense
of their humbler neighbours, and in domestic life he displayed
attachment to his wife and children: it redounds moreover to his
credit that he was the first to depart from the barbarous custom
of putting to death the captive kings and generals of the enemy,
after they had been exhibited in triumph.  But this did not prevent
him from separating from his beloved wife at the command of his lord
and master Sulla, because she belonged to an outlawed family,
nor from ordering with great composure that men who had stood
by him and helped him in times of difficulty should be executed
before his eyes at the nod of the same master:(9) he was not cruel,
thoughhe was reproached with being so, but--what perhaps was worse--
he was cold and, in good as in evil, unimpassioned.  In the tumult
of battle he faced the enemy fearlessly; in civil life he was a shy
man, whose cheek flushed on the slightest occasion; he spoke
in public not without embarrassment, and generally was angular, stiff,
and awkward in intercourse.  With all his haughty obstinacy he was--
as indeed persons ordinarily are, who make a display of their
independence--a pliant tool in the hands of men who knew how
to manage him, especially of his freedmen and clients, by whom he had
no fear of being controlled.  For nothing was he less qualified
than for a statesman.  Uncertain as to his aims, unskilful in the choice
of his means, alike in little and great matters shortsighted
and helpless, he was wont to conceal his irresolution and indecision
under a solemn silence, and, when he thought to play a subtle
game, simply to deceive himself with the belief that he was
deceiving others.  By his military position and his territorial
connections he acquired almost without any action of his own
a considerable party personally devoted to him, with which
the greatest things might have been accomplished; but Pompeius
was in every respect incapable of leading and keeping together a party,
and, if it still kept together, it did so--in like manner without
his action--through the sheer force of circumstances.  In this,
as in other things, he reminds us of Marius; but Marius, with his
nature of boorish roughness and sensuous passion, was still less
intolerable than this most tiresome and most starched of all
artificial great men.  His political position was utterly perverse.
He was a Sullan officer and under obligation to stand up for
the restored constitution, and yet again in opposition to Sulla
personally as well as to the whole senatorial government.  The gens
of the Pompeii, which had only been named for some sixty years
in the consular lists, had by no means acquired full standing
in the eyes of the aristocracy; even the father of this Pompeius
had occupied a very invidious equivocal position towards
the senate,(10) and he himself had once been in the ranks
of the Cinnans(11)--recollections which were suppressed perhaps,
but not forgotten.  The prominent position which Pompeius
acquired for himself under Sulla set him at inward variance
with the aristocracy, quite as much as it brought him into outward
connection with it.  Weak-headed as he was, Pompeius was seized
with giddiness on the height of glory which he had climbed
with such dangerous rapidity and ease.  Just as if he would himself
ridicule his dry prosaic nature by the parallel with the most
poetical of all heroic figures, he began to compare himself
with Alexander the Great, and to account himself a man of unique
standing, whom it did not beseem to be merely one of the five
hundred senators of Rome.  In reality, no one was more fitted
to take his place as a member of an aristocratic government than
Pompeius.  His dignified outward appearance, his solemn formality,
his personal bravery, his decorous private life, his want
of all initiative might have gained for him, had he been born
two hundred years earlier, an honourable place by the side
of Quintus Maximus and Publius Decius: this mediocrity, so characteristic
of the genuine Optimate and the genuine Roman, contributed not a little
to the elective affinity which subsisted at all times between Pompeius
and the mass of the burgesses and the senate.  Even in his own age
he would have had a clearly defined and respectable position
had he contented himself with being the general of the senate,
for which he was from the outset destined.  With this he was
not content, and so he fell into the fatal plight of wishing
to be something else than he could be.  He was constantly aspiring
to a special position in the state, and, when it offered itself,
he could not make up his mind to occupy it; he was deeply indignant
when persons and laws did not bend unconditionally before him,
and yet he everywhere bore himself with no mere affectation
of modesty as one of many peers, and trembled at the mere thought
of undertaking anything unconstitutional.  Thus constantly
at fundamental variance with, and yet at the same time the obedient
servant of, the oligarchy, constantly tormented by an ambition
which was frightened at its own aims, his much-agitated life
passed joylessly away in a perpetual inward contradiction.

Crassus

Marcus Crassus cannot, any more than Pompeius, be reckoned among
the unconditional adherents of the oligarchy.  He is a personage
highly characteristic of this epoch.  Like Pompeius, whose senior
he was by a few years, he belonged to the circle of the high Roman
aristocracy, had obtained the usual education befitting his rank,
and had like Pompeius fought with distinction under Sulla
in the Italian war.  Far inferior to many of his peers in mental gifts,
literary culture, and military talent, he outstripped them
by his boundless activity, and by the perseverance with which he strove
to possess everything and to become all-important.  Above all,
he threw himself into speculation.  Purchases of estates during
the revolution formed the foundation of his wealth; but he disdained
no branch of gain; he carried on the business of building
in the capital on a great scale and with prudence; he entered
into partnership with his freedmen in the most varied undertakings;
he acted as banker both in and out of Rome, in person or by his agents;
he advanced money to his colleagues in the senate, and undertook--
as it might happen--to execute works or to bribe the tribunals
on their account.  He was far from nice in the matter
of making profit.  On occasion of the Sullan proscriptions a forgery
in the lists had been proved against him, for which reason Sulla
made no more use of him thenceforward in the affairs of state:
he did not refuse to accept an inheritance, because the testamentary
document which contained his name was notoriously forged; he made
no objection, when his bailiffs by force or by fraud dislodged
the petty holders from lands which adjoined his own.  He avoided open
collisions, however, with criminal justice, and lived himself
like a genuine moneyed man in homely and simple style.  In this way
Crassus rose in the course of a few years from a man of ordinary
senatorial fortune to be the master of wealth which not long before
his death, after defraying enormous extraordinary expenses, still
amounted to 170,000,000 sesterces (1,700,000 pounds).  He had
become the richest of Romans and thereby, at the same time, a great
political power.  If, according to his expression, no one might
call himself rich who could not maintain an army from his revenues,
one who could do this was hardly any longer a mere citizen.
In reality the views of Crassus aimed at a higher object than
the possession of the best-filled money-chest in Rome.  He grudged
no pains to extend his connections.  He knew how to salute by name
every burgess of the capital.  He refused to no suppliant
his assistance in court.  Nature, indeed, had not done much
for him as an orator: his speaking was dry, his delivery monotonous,
he had difficulty of hearing; but his tenacity of purpose,
which no wearisomeness deterred and no enjoyment distracted, overcame
such obstacles.  He never appeared unprepared, he never extemporized,
and so he became a pleader at all times in request and at all times
ready; to whom it was no derogation that a cause was rarely too bad
for him, and that he knew how to influence the judges not merely
by his oratory, but also by his connections and, on occasion,
by his gold.  Half the senate was in debt to him; his habit of advancing
to "friends" money without interest revocable at pleasure rendered
a number of influential men dependent on him, and the more so that,
like a genuine man of business, he made no distinction among
the parties, maintained connections on all hands, and readily lent
to every one who was able to pay or otherwise useful.  The most daring
party-leaders, who made their attacks recklessly in all directions,
were careful not to quarrel with Crassus; he was compared
to the bull of the herd, whom it was advisable for none to provoke.
That such a man, so disposed and so situated, could not strive
after humble aims is clear; and, in a very different way from Pompeius,
Crassus knew exactly like a banker the objects and the means
of political speculation.  From the origin of Rome capital
was a political power there; the age was of such a sort, that everything
seemed accessible to gold as to iron.  If in the time of revolution
a capitalist aristocracy might have thought of overthrowing
the oligarchy of the gentes, a man like Crassus might raise
his eyes higher than to the -fasces- and embroidered mantle
of the triumphators.  For the moment he was a Sullan and adherent
of the senate; but he was too much of a financier to devote himself
to a definite political party, or to pursue aught else than his personal
advantage.  Why should Crassus, the wealthiest and most intriguing
man in Rome, and no penurious miser but a speculator on the greatest
scale, not speculate also on the crown?  Alone, perhaps,
he could not attain this object; but he had already carried out
various great transactions in partnership; it was not impossible
that for this also a suitable partner might present himself.
It is a trait characteristic of the time, that a mediocre orator
and officer, a politician who took his activity for energy
and his covetousness for ambition, one who at bottom had nothing
but a colossal fortune and the mercantile talent of forming
connections--that such a man, relying on the omnipotence of coteries
and intrigues, could deem himself on a level with the first generals
and statesmen of his day, and could contend with them
for the highest prize which allures political ambition.

Leaders of the Democrats

In the opposition proper, both among the liberal conservatives
and among the Populares, the storms of revolution had made fearful
havoc.  Among the former, the only surviving man of note was Gaius
Cotta (630-c. 681), the friend and ally of Drusus, and as such
banished in 663,(12) and then by Sulla's victory brought back
to his native land;(13) he was a shrewd man and a capable advocate,
but not called, either by the weight of his party or by that of his
personal standing, to act more than a respectable secondary part.
In the democratic party, among the rising youth, Gaius Julius
Caesar, who was twenty-four years of age (born 12 July 652?(14)),
drew towards him the eyes of friend and foe.  His relationship
with Marius and Cinna (his father's sister had been the wife of Marius,
he himself had married Cinna's daughter); the courageous refusal
of the youth who had scarce outgrown the age of boyhood to send
a divorce to his young wife Cornelia at the bidding of the dictator,
as Pompeius had in the like case done; his bold persistence
in the priesthood conferred upon him by Marius, but revoked by Sulla;
his wanderings during the proscription with which he was threatened,
and which was with difficulty averted by the intercession
of his relatives; his bravery in the conflicts before Mytilene
and in Cilicia, a bravery which no one had expected from the tenderly
reared and almost effeminately foppish boy; even the warnings
of Sulla regarding the "boy in the petticoat" in whom more than a Marius
lay concealed--all these were precisely so many recommendations
in the eyes of the democratic party.  But Caesar could only be the object
of hopes for the future; and the men who from their age and their
public position would have been called now to seize the reins
of the party and the state, were all dead or in exile.

Lepidus

Thus the leadership of the democracy, in the absence of a man
with a true vocation for it, was to be had by any one who might please
to give himself forth as the champion of oppressed popular freedom;
and in this way it came to Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, a Sullan,
who from motives more than ambiguous deserted to the camp
of the democracy.  Once a zealous Optimate, and a large purchaser
at the auctions of the proscribed estates, he had, as governor of Sicily,
so scandalously plundered the province that he was threatened
with impeachment, and, to evade it, threw himself into opposition.
It was a gain of doubtful value.  No doubt the opposition
thus acquired a well-known name, a man of quality, a vehement orator
in the Forum; but Lepidus was an insignificant and indiscreet
personage, who did not deserve to stand at the head either
in council or in the field.  Nevertheless the opposition welcomed him,
and the new leader of the democrats succeeded not only in deterring
his accusers from prosecuting the attack on him which they had
begun, but also in carrying his election to the consulship
for 676; in which, we may add, he was helped not only by the treasures
exacted in Sicily, but also by the foolish endeavour of Pompeius
to show Sulla and the pure Sullans on this occasion what he could do.
Now that the opposition had, on the death of Sulla, found a head
once more in Lepidus, and now that this their leader had become
the supreme magistrate of the state, the speedy outbreak of a new
revolution in the capital might with certainty be foreseen.

The Emigrants in Spain
Sertorius

But even before the democrats moved in the capital, the democratic
emigrants had again bestirred themselves in Spain.  The soul
of this movement was Quintus Sertorius.  This excellent man,
a native of Nursia in the Sabine land, was from the first
of a tender and even soft organization--as his almost enthusiastic love
for his mother, Raia, shows--and at the same time of the most chivalrous
bravery, as was proved by the honourable scars which he brought
home from the Cimbrian, Spanish, and Italian wars.  Although wholly
untrained as an orator, he excited the admiration of learned
advocates by the natural flow and the striking self-possession
of his address.  His remarkable military and statesmanly talent
had found opportunity of shining by contrast, more particularly
in the revolutionary war which the democrats so wretchedly and stupidly
mismanaged; he was confessedly the only democratic officer
who knew how to prepare and to conduct war, and the only democratic
statesman who opposed the insensate and furious doings of his party
with statesmanlike energy.  His Spanish soldiers called him the new
Hannibal, and not merely because he had, like that hero, lost
an eye in war.  He in reality reminds us of the great Phoenician
by his equally cunning and courageous strategy, by his rare talent
of organizing war by means of war, by his adroitness in attracting
foreign nations to his interest and making them serviceable to his ends,
by his prudence in success and misfortune, by the quickness
of his ingenuity in turning to good account his victories
and averting the consequences of his defeats.  It may be doubted
whether any Roman statesman of the earlier period, or of the present,
can be compared in point of versatile talent to Sertorius.
After Sulla's generals had compelled him to quit Spain,(15)
he had led a restless life of adventure along the Spanish and African
coasts, sometimes in league, sometimes at war, with the Cilician
pirates who haunted these seas, and with the chieftains
of the roving tribes of Libya.  The victorious Roman restoration had
pursued him even thither: when he was besieging Tingis (Tangiers),
a corps under Pacciaecus from Roman Africa had come to the help
of the prince of the town; but Pacciaecus was totally defeated,
and Tingis was taken by Sertorius.  On the report of such achievements
by the Roman refugee spreading abroad, the Lusitanians, who,
notwithstanding their pretended submission to the Roman supremacy,
practically maintained their independence, and annually fought
with the governors of Further Spain, sent envoys to Sertorius
in Africa, to invite him to join them, and to commit to him
the command of their militia.

Renewed Outbreak of the Spanish Insurrection
Metellus Sent to Spain

Sertorius, who twenty years before had served under Titus Didius
in Spain and knew the resources of the land, resolved to comply
with the invitation, and, leaving behind a small detachment
on the Mauretanian coast, embarked for Spain (about 674).
The straits separating Spain and Africa were occupied by a Roman
squadron commanded by Cotta; to steal through it was impossible;
so Sertorius fought his way through and succeeded in reaching
the Lusitanians.  There were not more than twenty Lusitanian
communities that placed themselves under his orders; and even
of "Romans" he mustered only 2600 men, a considerable part
of whom were deserters from the army of Pacciaecus or Africans
armed after the Roman style.  Sertorius saw that everything depended on
his associating with the loose guerilla-bands a strong nucleus
of troops possessing Roman organization and discipline: for this end
he reinforced the band which he had brought with him by levying
4000 infantry and 700 cavalry, and with this one legion
and the swarms of Spanish volunteers advanced against the Romans.
The command in Further Spain was held by Lucius Fufidius,
who through his absolute devotion to Sulla--well tried amidst
the proscriptions--had risen from a subaltern to be propraetor;
he was totally defeated on the Baetis; 2000 Romans covered the field
of battle.  Messengers in all haste summoned the governor
of the adjoining province of the Ebro, Marcus Domitius Calvinus,
to check the farther advance of the Sertorians; and there soon appeared
(675) also the experienced general Quintus Metellus, sent by Sulla
to relieve the incapable Fufidius in southern Spain.  But they did
not succeed in mastering the revolt.  In the Ebro province
not only was the army of Calvinus destroyed and he himself slain
by the lieutenant of Sertorius, the quaestor Lucius Hirtuleius,
but Lucius Manlius, the governor of Transalpine Gaul, who had crossed
the Pyrenees with three legions to the help of his colleague,
was totally defeated by the same brave leader.  With difficulty
Manlius escaped with a few men to Ilerda (Lerida) and thence
to his province, losing on the march his whole baggage through
a sudden attack of the Aquitanian tribes.  In Further Spain Metellus
penetrated into the Lusitanian territory; but Sertorius succeeded
during the siege of Longobriga (not far from the mouth
of the Tagus) in alluring a division under Aquinus into an ambush,
and thereby compelling Metellus himself to raise the siege
and to evacuate the Lusitanian territory.  Sertorius followed him,
defeated on the Anas (Guadiana) the corps of Thorius, and inflicted
vast damage by guerilla warfare on the army of the commander-in-
chief himself.  Metellus, a methodical and somewhat clumsy
tactician, was in despair as to this opponent, who obstinately
declined a decisive battle, but cut off his supplies
and communications and constantly hovered round him on all sides.

Organizations of Sertorius

These extraordinary successes obtained by Sertorius
in the two Spanish provinces were the more significant,
that they were not achieved merely by arms and were not of a mere
military nature.  The emigrants as such were not formidable;
nor were isolated successes of the Lusitanians under this or that
foreign leader of much moment.  But with the most decided political
and patriotic tact Sertorius acted, whenever he could do so,
not as condottiere of the Lusitanians in revolt against Rome,
but as Roman general and governor of Spain, in which capacity
he had in fact been sent thither by the former rulers.
He began(16) to form the heads of the emigration into a senate,
which was to increase to 300 members and to conduct affairs
and to nominate magistrates in Roman form.  He regarded his army
as a Roman one, and filled the officers' posts, without exception,
with Romans.  When facing the Spaniards, he was the governor,
who by virtue of his office levied troops and other support
from them; but he was a governor who, instead of exercising
the usual despotic sway, endeavoured to attach the provincials
to Rome and to himself personally.  His chivalrous character
rendered it easy for him to enter into Spanish habits,
and excited in the Spanish nobility the most ardent enthusiasm
for the wonderful foreigner who had a spirit so kindred
with their own.  According to the warlike custom of personal following
which subsisted in Spain as among the Celts and the Germans,
thousands of the noblest Spaniards swore to stand faithfully
by their Roman general unto death; and in them Sertorius found
more trustworthy comrades than in his countrymen and party-associates.
He did not disdain to turn to account the superstition of the ruder
Spanish tribes, and to have his plans of war brought to him as commands
of Diana by the white fawn of the goddess.  Throughout he exercised
a just and gentle rule.  His troops, at least so far as his eye
and his arm reached, had to maintain the strictest discipline.
Gentle as he generally was in punishing, he showed himself inexorable
when any outrage was perpetrated by his soldiers on friendly soil.
Nor was he inattentive to the permanent alleviation of the condition
of the provincials; he reduced the tribute, and directed the soldiers
to construct winter barracks for themselves, so that the oppressive
burden of quartering the troops was done away and thus a source
of unspeakable mischief and annoyance was stopped.  For the children
of Spaniards of quality an academy was erected at Osca (Huesca),
in which they received the higher instruction usual in Rome,
learning to speak Latin and Greek, and to wear the toga--a remarkable
measure, which was by no means designed merely to take from the allies
in as gentle a form as possible the hostages that in Spain
were inevitable, but was above all an emanation from, and an advance
onthe great project of Gaius Gracchus and the democratic
party for gradually Romanizing the provinces.  It was the first
attempt to accomplish their Romanization not by extirpating
the old inhabitants and filling their places with Italian emigrants,
but by Romanizing the provincials themselves.  The Optimates
in Rome sneered at the wretched emigrant, the runaway from the Italian
army, the last of the robber-band of Carbo; the sorry taunt
recoiled upon its authors.  The masses that had been brought into
the field against Sertorius were reckoned, including the Spanish
general levy, at 120,000 infantry, 2000 archers and slingers,
and 6000 cavalry.  Against this enormous superiority of force Sertorius
had not only held his ground in a series of successful conflicts
and victories, but had also reduced the greater part of Spain
under his power.  In the Further province Metellus found himself
confined to the districts immediately occupied by his troops;
hereall the tribes, who could, had taken the side of Sertorius.
In the Hither province, after the victories of Hirtuleius,
there no longer existed a Roman army.  Emissaries of Sertorius
roamed through the whole territory of Gaul; there, too,
the tribes began to stir, and bands gathering together began
to make the Alpine passes insecure.  Lastly the sea too belonged
quite as much to the insurgents as to the legitimate government,
since the allies of the former--the pirates--were almost as powerful
in the Spanish waters as the Roman ships of war.  At the promontory
of Diana (now Denia, between Valencia and Alicante) Sertorius established
for the corsairs a fixed station, where they partly lay in wait
for such Roman ships as were conveying supplies to the Roman
maritime towns and the army, partly carried away or delivered goods
for the insurgents, and partly formed their medium of intercourse
with Italy and Asia Minor.  The constant readiness of these men moving
to and fro to carry everywhere sparks from the scene of conflagration
tended in a high degree to excite apprehension, especially at a time
when so much combustible matter was everywhere accumulated
in the Roman empire.

Death of Sulla and Its Consequences

Amidst this state of matters the sudden death of Sulla took place
(676).  So long as the man lived, at whose voice a trained
and trustworthy army of veterans was ready any moment to rise,
the oligarchy might tolerate the almost (as it seemed)
definite abandonment of the Spanish provinces to the emigrants,
and the election of the leader of the opposition at home to be supreme
magistrate, at all events as transient misfortunes; and in their
shortsighted way, yet not wholly without reason, might cherish
confidence either that the opposition would not venture to proceed
to open conflict, or that, if it did venture, he who had twice
saved the oligarchy would set it up a third time.  Now the state
of things was changed.  The democratic Hotspurs in the capital,
long impatient of the endless delay and inflamed by the brilliant news
from Spain, urged that a blow should be struck; and Lepidus,
with whom the decision for the moment lay, entered into the proposal
with all the zeal of a renegade and with his own characteristic
frivolity.  For a moment it seemed as if the torch which kindled
the funeral pile of the regent would also kindle civil war;
but the influence of Pompeius and the temper of the Sullan veterans
induced the opposition to let the obsequies of the regent
pass over in peace.

Insurrection of Lepidus

Yet all the more openly were arrangements thenceforth made
to introduce a fresh revolution.  Daily the Forum resounded
with accusations against the "mock Romulus" and his executioners.
Even before the great potentate had closed his eyes, the overthrow
of the Sullan constitution, the re-establishment of the distributions
of grain, the reinstating of the tribunes of the people in their
former position, the recall of those who were banished contrary
to law, the restoration of the confiscated lands, were openly indicated
by Lepidus and his adherents as the objects at which they aimed.
Now communications were entered into with the proscribed;
Marcus Perpenna, governor of Sicily in the days of Cinna,(17)
arrived in the capital.  The sons of those whom Sulla had declared
guilty of treason--on whom the laws of the restoration bore
with intolerable severity--and generally the more noted men of Marian
views were invited to give their accession.  Not a few, such as
the young Lucius Cinna, joined the movement; others, however,
followed the example of Gaius Caesar, who had returned home from Asia
on receiving the accounts of the death of Sulla and of the plans
of Lepidus, but after becoming more accurately acquainted
with the character of the leader and of the movement prudently withdrew.
Carousing and recruiting went on in behalf of Lepidus
in the taverns and brothels of the capital.  At length a conspiracy
against the new order of things was concocted among the Etruscan
malcontents.(18)

All this took place under the eyes of the government The consul
Catulus as well as the more judicious Optimates urged an immediate
decisive interference and suppression of the revolt in the bud;
the indolent majority, however, could not make up their minds to begin
the struggle, but tried to deceive themselves as long as possible
by a system of compromises and concessions.  Lepidus also on his
part at first entered into it.  The suggestion, which proposed
a restoration of the prerogatives taken away from the tribunes
of the people, he as well as his colleague Catulus repelled.
On the other hand, the Gracchan distribution of grain
was to a limited extent re-established.  According to it not all
(as according to the Sempronian law) but only a definite number--
presumably 40,000--of the poorer burgesses appear to have received
the earlier largesses, as Gracchus had fixed them, of five -modii-
monthly at the price of 6 1/3 -asses- (3 pence)--a regulation
which occasioned to the treasury an annual net loss of at least
40,000 pounds.(19)  The opposition, naturally as little satisfied
as it was decidedly emboldened by this partial concession, displayed
all the more rudeness and violence in the capital; and in Etruria,
the true centre of all insurrections of the Italian proletariate,
civil war already broke out, the dispossessed Faesulans resumed
possession of their lost estates by force of arms, and several
of the veterans settled there by Sulla perished in the tumult.
The senate on learning what had occurred resolved to send the two consuls
thither, in order to raise troops and suppress the insurrection.(20)
It was impossible to adopt a more irrational course.  The senate,
in presence of the insurrection, evinced its pusillanimity
and its fears by the re-establishment of the corn-law; in order
to be relieved from a street-riot, it furnished the notorious
head of the insurrection with an army; and, when the two consuls
were bound by the most solemn oath which could be contrived not to turn
the arms entrusted to them against each other, it must have required
the superhuman obduracy of oligarchic consciences to think of erecting
such a bulwark against the impending insurrection.  Of course Lepidus
armed in Etruria not for the senate, but for the insurrection--
sarcastically declaring that the oath which he had taken bound him
only for the current year.  The senate put the oracular machinery
in motion to induce him to return, and committed to him the conduct
of the impending consular elections; but Lepidus evaded compliance,
and, while messengers passed to and fro and the official year drew
to an end amidst proposals of accommodation, his force swelled to an army.
When at length, in the beginning of the following year (677),
the definite order of the senate was issued to Lepidus to return
without delay, the proconsul haughtily refused obedience,
and demanded in his turn the renewal of the former tribunician power,
the reinstatement of those who had been forcibly ejected
from their civic rights and their property, and, besides this,
his own re-election as consul for the current year or, in other words,
the -tyrannis- in legal form.

Outbreak of the War
Lepidus Defeated
Death of Lepidus

Thus war was declared.  The senatorial party could reckon, in addition to
the Sullan veterans whose civil existence was threatened by Lepidus,
upon the army assembled by the proconsul Catulus; and so, in compliance
with the urgent warnings of the more sagacious, particularly of Philippus,
Catulus was entrusted by the senate with the defence of the capital
and the repelling of the main force of the democratic party stationed
in Etruria.  At the same time Gnaeus Pompeius was despatched with another
corps to wrest from his former protege the valley of the Po, which was held
by Lepidus' lieutenant, Marcus Brutus.  While Pompeius speedily
accomplished his commission and shut up the enemy's general closely
in Mutina, Lepidus appeared before the capital in order to conquer
it for the revolution as Marius had formerly done by storm.
The right bank of the Tiber fell wholly into his power, and he was able
even to cross the river.  The decisive battle was fought
on the Campus Martius, close under the walls of the city.
But Catulus conquered; and Lepidus was compelled to retreat to Etruria,
while another division, under his son Scipio, threw itself
into the fortress of Alba.  Thereupon the rising was substantially
atan end.  Mutina surrendered to Pompeius; and Brutus was,
notwithstanding the safe-conduct promised to him, subsequently
put to death by order of that general.  Alba too was, after a long siege,
reduced by famine, and the leader there was likewise executed.
Lepidus, pressed on two sides by Catulus and Pompeius, fought another
engagement on the coast of Etruria in order merely to procure
the means of retreat, and then embarked at the port of Cosa for Sardinia
from which point he hoped to cut off the supplies of the capital,
and to obtain communication with the Spanish insurgents.
But the governor of the island opposed to him a vigorous resistance;
and he himself died, not long after his landing, of consumption (677),
whereupon the war in Sardinia came to an end.  A part of his soldiers
dispersed; with the flower of the insurrectionary army
and with a well-filled chest the late praetor, Marcus Perpenna,
proceeded to Liguria, and thence to Spain to join the Sertorians.

Pompeius Extorts the Command in Spain

The oligarchy was thus victorious over Lepidus; but it found itself
compelled by the dangerous turn of the Sertorian war to concessions,
which violated the letter as well as the spirit of the Sullan
constitution.  It was absolutely necessary to send a strong
army and an able general to Spain; and Pompeius indicated,
very plainly, that he desired, or rather demanded, this commission.
The pretension was bold.  It was already bad enough that they
had allowed this secret opponent again to attain an extraordinary
command in the pressure of the Lepidian revolution; but it was far
more hazardous, in disregard of all the rules instituted by Sulla
for the magisterial hierarchy, to invest a man who had hitherto
filled no civil office with one of the most important ordinary
provincial governorships, under circumstances in which the observance
of the legal term of a year was not to be thought of.
The oligarchy had thus, even apart from the respect due to their
general Metellus, good reason to oppose with all earnestness
this new attempt of the ambitious youth to perpetuate his exceptional
position.  But this was not easy.  In the first place, they had
not a single man fitted for the difficult post of general in Spain.
Neither of the consuls of the year showed any desire to measure
himself against Sertorius; and what Lucius Philippus said in a full
meeting of the senate had to be admitted as too true--that, among
all the senators of note, not one was able and willing to command
in a serious war.  Yet they might, perhaps, have got over this,
and after the manner of oligarchs, when they had no capable candidate,
have filled the place with some sort of makeshift, if Pompeius had
merely desired the command and had not demanded it at the head
of an army.  He had already lent a deaf ear to the injunctions
of Catulus that he should dismiss the army; it was at least doubtful
whether those of the senate would find a better reception,
and the consequences of a breach no one could calculate--
the scale of aristocracy might very easily mount up, if the sword
of a well-known general were thrown into the opposite scale.
So the majority resolved on concession.  Not from the people,
which constitutionally ought to have been consulted in a case
where a private man was to be invested with the supreme magisterial
power, but from the senate, Pompeius received proconsular authority
and the chief command in Hither Spain; and, forty days after he had
received it, crossed the Alps in the summer of 677.

Pompeius in Gaul

First of all the new general found employment in Gaul,
where no formal insurrection had broken out, but serious disturbances
of the peace had occurred at several places; in consequence
of which Pompeius deprived the cantons of the Volcae-Arecomici
and the Helvii of their independence, and placed them under Massilia.
He also laid out a new road over the Cottian Alps (Mont Genevre,(21)),
and so established a shorter communication between the valley
of the Po and Gaul.  Amidst this work the best season of the year
passed away; it was not till late in autumn that Pompeius crossed
the Pyrenees.

Appearance of Pompeius in Spain

Sertorius had meanwhile not been idle.  He had despatched
Hirtuleius into the Further province to keep Metellus in check,
and had himself endeavoured to follow up his complete victory
in the Hither province, and to prepare for the reception of Pompeius.
The isolated Celtiberian towns there, which still adhered to Rome,
were attacked and reduced one after another; at last, in the very
middle of winter, the strong Contrebia (south-east of Saragossa)
had fallen.  In vain the hard-pressed towns had sent message
after message to Pompeius; he would not be induced by any entreaties
to depart from his wonted rut of slowly advancing.  With the exception
of the maritime towns, which were defended by the Roman fleet,
and the districts of the Indigetes and Laletani in the north-east
corner of Spain, where Pompeius established himself after he had
at length crossed the Pyrenees, and made his raw troops bivouac
throughout the winter to inure them to hardships, the whole
of Hither Spain had at the end of 677 become by treaty or force
dependent on Sertorius, and the district on the upper and middle
Ebro thenceforth continued the main stay of his power.  Even
the apprehension, which the fresh Roman force and the celebrated name
of the general excited in the army of the insurgents, had a salutary
effect on it.  Marcus Perpenna, who hitherto as the equal
of Sertorius in rank had claimed an independent command over the force
which he had brought with him from Liguria, was, on the news
of the arrival of Pompeius in Spain, compelled by his soldiers
to place himself under the orders of his abler colleague.

For the campaign of 678 Sertorius again employed the corps
of Hirtuleius against Metellus, while Perpenna with a strong army
took up his position along the lower course of the Ebro to prevent
Pompeius from crossing the river, if he should march, as was
to be expected, in a southerly direction with the view of effecting
a junction with Metellus, and along the coast for the sake
of procuring supplies for his troops.  The corps of Gaius Herennius
was destined to the immediate support of Perpenna; farther inland
on the upper Ebro, Sertorius in person prosecuted meanwhile
the subjugation of several districts friendly to Rome, and held himself
at the same time ready to hasten according to circumstances
to the aid of Perpenna or Hirtuleius.  It was still his intention
to avoid any pitched battle, and to annoy the enemy by petty
conflicts and cutting off supplies.

Pompeius Defeated

Pompeius, however, forced the passage of the Ebro against Perpenna
and took up a position on the river Pallantias, near Saguntum,
whence, as we have already said, the Sertorians maintained their
communications with Italy and the east.  It was time that Sertorius
should appear in person, and throw the superiority of his numbers
and of his genius into the scale against the greater excellence
of the soldiers of his opponent.  For a considerable time the struggle
was concentrated around the town of Lauro (on the Xucar, south
of Valencia), which had declared for Pompeius and was on that account
besieged by Sertorius.  Pompeius exerted himself to the utmost
to relieve it; but, after several of his divisions had already been
assailed separately and cut to pieces, the great warrior found
himself--just when he thought that he had surrounded the Sertorians,
and when he had already invited the besieged to be spectators
of the capture of the besieging army--all of a sudden completely
outmanoeuvred; and in order that he might not be himself
surrounded, he had to look on from his camp at the capture
and reduction to ashes of the allied town and at the carrying off
of its inhabitants to Lusitania--an event which induced a number
of towns that had been wavering in middle and eastern Spain
to adhere anew to Sertorius.

Victories of Metellus

Meanwhile Metellus fought with better fortune.  In a sharp
engagement at Italica (not far from Seville), which Hirtuleius had
imprudently risked, and in which both generals fought hand to hand
and Hirtuleius was wounded, Metellus defeated him and compelled him
to evacuate the Roman territory proper, and to throw himself
into Lusitania.  This victory permitted Metellus to unite with Pompeius.
The two generals took up their winter-quarters in 678-79
at the Pyrenees, and in the next campaign in 679 they resolved
to make a joint attack on the enemy in his position near Valentia.
But while Metellus was advancing, Pompeius offered battle beforehand
to the main army of the enemy, with a view to wipe out the stain
of Lauro and to gain the expected laurels, if possible, alone.
With joy Sertorius embraced the opportunity of fighting with Pompeius
before Metellus arrived.

Battle on the Sucro

The armies met on the river Sucro (Xucar): after a sharp conflict
Pompeius was beaten on the right wing, and was himself carried
from the field severely wounded.  Afranius no doubt conquered
with the left and took the camp of the Sertorians, but during its pillage
he was suddenly assailed by Sertorius and compelled also to give way.
Had Sertorius been able to renew the battle on the following
day, the army of Pompeius would perhaps have been annihilated.
But meanwhile Metellus had come up, had overthrown the corps
of Perpenna ranged against him, and taken his camp: it was not
possible to resume the battle against the two armies united.  The
successes of Metellus, the junction of the hostile forces, the
sudden stagnation after the victory, diffused terror among the
Sertorians; and, as not unfrequently happened with Spanish armies,
in consequence of this turn of things the greater portion
of the Sertorian soldiers dispersed.  But the despondency passed away
as quickly as it had come; the white fawn, which represented
in the eyes of the multitude the military plans of the general,
was soon more popular than ever; in a short time Sertorius appeared
with a new army confronting the Romans in the level country
to the south of Saguntum (Murviedro), which firmly adhered to Rome,
while the Sertorian privateers impeded the Roman supplies by sea,
and scarcity was already making itself felt in the Roman camp.
Another battle took place in the plains of the river Turia
(Guadalaviar), and the struggle was long undecided.  Pompeius
with the cavalry was defeated by Sertorius, and his brother-in-law
and quaestor, the brave Lucius Memmius, was slain; on the other hand
Metellus vanquished Perpenna, and victoriously repelled the attack
of the enemy's main army directed against him, receiving himself
a wound in the conflict.  Once more the Sertorian army dispersed.
Valentia, which Gaius Herennius held for Sertorius, was taken
and razed to the ground.  The Romans, probably for a moment,
cherished a hope that they were done with their tough antagonist.
The Sertorian army had disappeared; the Roman troops, penetrating
far into the interior, besieged the general himself in the fortress
Clunia on the upper Douro.  But while they vainly invested
this rocky stronghold, the contingents of the insurgent communities
assembled elsewhere; Sertorius stole out of the fortress and even
before the expiry of the year stood once more as general
at the head of an army.

Again the Roman generals had to take up their winter quarters
with the cheerless prospect of an inevitable renewal of their Sisyphean
war-toils.  It was not even possible to choose quarters in the region
of Valentia, so important on account of the communication with Italy
and the east, but fearfully devastated by friend and foe;
Pompeius led his troops first into the territory of the Vascones(22)
(Biscay) and then spent the winter in the territory of the Vaccaei
(about Valladolid), and Metellus even in Gaul.

Indefinite and Perilous Character of the Sertorian War

For five years the Sertorian war thus continued, and still
there seemed no prospect of its termination.  The state suffered
from it beyond description.  The flower of the Italian youth perished
amid the exhausting fatigues of these campaigns.  The public treasury
was not only deprived of the Spanish revenues, but had annually
to send to Spain for the pay and maintenance of the Spanish armies
very considerable sums, which the government hardly knew how
to raise.  Spain was devastated and impoverished, and the Roman
civilization, which unfolded so fair a promise there, received
a severe shock; as was naturally to be expected in the case
ofan insurrectionary war waged with so much bitterness,
and but too often occasioning the destruction of whole communities.
Even the towns which adhered to the dominant party in Rome had countless
hardships to endure; those situated on the coast had to be provided
with necessaries by the Roman fleet, and the situation of the faithful
communities in the interior was almost desperate.  Gaul suffered
hardly less, partly from the requisitions for contingents
of infantry and cavalry, for grain and money, partly
from the oppressive burden of the winter-quarters, which rose
to an intolerable degree in consequence of the bad harvest of 680;
almost all the local treasuries were compelled to betake themselves
to the Roman bankers, and to burden themselves with a crushing load
of debt.  Generals and soldiers carried on the war with reluctance.
The generals had encountered an opponent far superior in talent,
a tough and protracted resistance, a warfare of very serious perils
and of successes difficult to be attained and far from brilliant;
it was asserted that Pompeius was scheming to get himself recalled
from Spain and entrusted with a more desirable command somewhere
else.  The soldiers, too, found little satisfaction in a campaign
in which not only was there nothing to be got save hard blows
and worthless booty, but their very pay was doled out to them
with extreme irregularity.  Pompeius reported to the senate, at the end
of 679, that the pay was two years in arrear, and that the army
was threatening to break up.  The Roman government might certainly
have obviated a considerable portion of these evils, if they could have
prevailed on themselves to carry on the Spanish war with less
remissness, to say nothing of better will.  In the main, however,
it was neither their fault nor the fault of their generals
that a genius so superior as that of Sertorius was able to carry on
this petty warfare year after year, despite of all numerical
and military superiority, on ground so thoroughly favourable
to insurrectionary and piratical warfare.  So little could its end
be foreseen, that the Sertorian insurrection seemed rather
as if it would become intermingled with other contemporary revolts
and thereby add to its dangerous character.  Just at that time
the Romans were contending on every sea with piratical fleets,
in Italy with the revolted slaves, in Macedonia with the tribes
on the lower Danube; and in the east Mithradates, partly induced
by the successes of the Spanish insurrection, resolved once more
to try the fortune of arms.  That Sertorius had formed connections
with the Italian and Macedonian enemies of Rome, cannot be distinctly
affirmed, although he certainly was in constant intercourse
with the Marians in Italy.  With the pirates, on the other hand,
he had previously formed an avowed league, and with the Pontic king--
with whom he had long maintained relations through the medium
of the Roman emigrants staying at his court--he now concluded
a formal treaty of alliance, in which Sertorius ceded to the king
the client-states of Asia Minor, but not the Roman province of Asia,
and promised, moreover, to send him an officer qualified to lead
his troops, and a number of soldiers, while the king, in turn,
bound himself to transmit to Sertorius forty ships and 3000 talents
(720,000 pounds).  The wise politicians in the capital were already
recalling the time when Italy found itself threatened by Philip
from the east and by Hannibal from the west; they conceived
that the new Hannibal, just like his predecessor, after having
by himself subdued Spain, could easily arrive with the forces
of Spain in Italy sooner than Pompeius, in order that,
like the Phoenician formerly, he might summon the Etruscans
and Samnites to arms against Rome.

Collapse of the Power of Sertorius

But this comparison was more ingenious than accurate.  Sertorius
was far from being strong enough to renew the gigantic enterprise
of Hannibal.  He was lost if he left Spain, where all his successes
were bound up with the peculiarities of the country and the people;
and even there he was more and more compelled to renounce
the offensive.  His admirable skill as a leader could not change
the nature of his troops.  The Spanish militia retained its character,
untrustworthy as the wave or the wind; now collected in masses
to the number of 150,000, now melting away again to a mere handful.
The Roman emigrants, likewise, continued insubordinate, arrogant,
and stubborn.  Those kinds of armed force which require that a corps
should keep together for a considerable time, such as cavalry
especially, were of course very inadequately represented
in his army.  The war gradually swept off his ablest officers
and the flower of his veterans; and even the most trustworthy
communities, weary of being harassed by the Romans and maltreated
by the Sertorian officers, began to show signs of impatience
and wavering allegiance.  It is remarkable that Sertorius,
in this respect also like Hannibal, never deceived himself
as to the hopelessness of his position; he allowed no opportunity
for bringing about a compromise to pass, and would have been ready
at any moment to lay down his staff of command on the assurance
of being allowed to live peacefully in his native land.
But political orthodoxy knows nothing of compromise and conciliation.
Sertorius might not recede or step aside; he was compelled inevitably
to move on along the path which he had once entered, however narrow
and giddy it might become.

The representations which Pompeius addressed to Rome, and which
derived emphasis from the behaviour of Mithradates in the east,
were successful.  He had the necessary supplies of money sent
to him by the senate and was reinforced by two fresh legions.
Thus the two generals went to work again in the spring of 680
and once more crossed the Ebro.  Eastern Spain was wrested
from the Sertorians in consequence of the battles on the Xucar
and Guadalaviar; the struggle thenceforth became concentrated
on the upper and middle Ebro around the chief strongholds
of the Sertorians--Calagurris, Osca, Ilerda.  As Metellus had done
best in the earlier campaigns, so too on this occasion he gained
the most important successes.  His old opponent Hirtuleius, who again
confronted him, was completely defeated and fell himself along with
his brother--an irreparable loss for the Sertorians.  Sertorius,
whom the unfortunate news reached just as he was on the point
of assailing the enemy opposed to him, cut down the messenger,
that the tidings might not discourage his troops; but the news
could not be long concealed.  One town after another surrendered,
Metellus occupied the Celtiberian towns of Segobriga (between Toledo
and Cuenca) and Bilbilis (near Calatayud).  Pompeius besieged
Pallantia (Palencia above Valladolid), but Sertorius relieved it,
and compelled Pompeius to fall back upon Metellus; in front
of Calagurris (Calahorra, on the upper Ebro), into which Sertorius
had thrown himself, they both suffered severe losses.  Nevertheless,
when they went into winter-quarters--Pompeius to Gaul, Metellus
to his own province--they were able to look back on considerable
results; a great portion of the insurgents had submitted or had
been subdued by arms.

In a similar way the campaign of the following year (681) ran
its course; in this case it was especially Pompeius who slowly
but steadily restricted the field of the insurrection.

Internal Dissension among the Sertorians

The discomfiture sustained by the arms of the insurgents failed
not to react on the tone of feeling in their camp.  The military
successes of Sertorius became like those of Hannibal, of necessity
less and less considerable; people began to call in question
his military talent: he was no longer, it was alleged,
what he had been; he spent the day in feasting or over his cups,
and squandered money as well as time.  The number of the deserters,
and of communities falling away, increased.  Soon projects formed
by the Roman emigrants against the life of the general were reported
to him; they sounded credible enough, especially as various officers
of the insurgent army, and Perpenna in particular, had submitted
with reluctance to the supremacy of Sertorius, and the Roman
governors had for long promised amnesty and a high reward to any
one who should kill him.  Sertorius, on hearing such allegations,
withdrew the charge of guarding his person from the Roman soldiers
and entrusted it to select Spaniards.  Against the suspected
themselves he proceeded with fearful but necessary severity,
and condemned various of the accused to death without resorting,
as in other cases, to the advice of his council; he was now
more dangerous--it was thereupon affirmed in the circles
of the malcontents--to his friends than to his foes.

Assassination of Sertorius

A second conspiracy was soon discovered, which had its seat
in his own staff; whoever was denounced had to take flight or die;
but all were not betrayed, and the remaining conspirators,
including especially Perpenna, found in the circumstances only
a new incentive to make haste.  They were in the headquarters
at Osca.  There, on the instigation of Perpenna, a brilliant victory
was reported to the general as having been achieved by his troops;
and at the festal banquet arranged by Perpenna to celebrate
this victory Sertorius accordingly appeared, attended, as was his wont,
by his Spanish retinue.  Contrary to former custom in the Sertorian
headquarters, the feast soon became a revel; wild words passed
at table, and it seemed as if some of the guests sought opportunity
to begin an altercation.  Sertorius threw himself back on his couch,
and seemed desirous not to hear the disturbance.  Then a wine-cup
was dashed on the floor; Perpenna had given the concerted sign.
Marcus Antonius, Sertorius' neighbour at table, dealt the first
blow against him, and when Sertorius turned round and attempted
to rise, the assassin flung himself upon him and held him down
till the other guests at table, all of them implicated
in the conspiracy, threw themselves on the struggling pair,
and stabbed he defenceless general while his arms were pinioned (682).
With him died his faithful attendants.  So ended one of the greatest
men, if not the very greatest man, that Rome had hitherto produced--
a man who under more fortunate circumstances would perhaps
have become the regenerator of his country--by the treason
of the wretched band of emigrants whom he was condemned to lead against
his native land.  History loves not the Coriolani; nor has she made
any exception even in the case of this the most magnanimous,
most gifted, most deserving to be regretted of them all.

Perpenna Succeeds Sertorius

The murderers thought to succeed to the heritage of the murdered.
After the death of Sertorius, Perpenna, as the highest among
the Roman officers of the Spanish army, laid claim to the chief
command.  The army submitted, but with mistrust and reluctance.
However men had murmured against Sertorius in his lifetime, death
reinstated the hero in his rights, and vehement was the indignation
of the soldiers when, on the publication of his testament, the name
of Perpenna was read forth among the heirs.  A part of the soldiers,
especially the Lusitanians, dispersed; the remainder had a presentiment
that with the death of Sertorius their spirit and their
fortune had departed.

Pompeius Puts an End to the Insurrection

Accordingly, at the first encounter with Pompeius, the wretchedly
led and despondent ranks of the insurgents were utterly broken,
and Perpenna, among other officers, was taken prisoner.  The wretch
sought to purchase his life by delivering up the correspondence
of Sertorius, which would have compromised numerous men of standing
in Italy; but Pompeius ordered the papers to be burnt unread,
and handed him, as well as the other chiefs of the insurgents,
overto the executioner.  The emigrants who had escaped dispersed;
and most of them went into the Mauretanian deserts or joined the pirates.
Soon afterwards the Plotian law, which was zealously supported
by the young Caesar in particular, opened up to a portion of them
the opportunity of returning home; but all those who had taken part
in the murder of Sertorius, with but a single exception, died
a violent death.  Osca, and most of the towns which had still adhered
to Sertorius in Hither Spain, now voluntarily opened their gates
to Pompeius; Uxama (Osma), Clunia, and Calagurris alone had to be
reduced by force.  The two provinces were regulated anew;
in the Further province, Metellus raised the annual tribute
of the most guilty communities; in the Hither, Pompeius dispensed
reward and punishment: Calagurris, for example, lost its independence
and was placed under Osca.  A band of Sertorian soldiers, which had
collected in the Pyrenees, was induced by Pompeius to surrender,
and was settled by him to the north of the Pyrenees near Lugudunum
(St.  Bertrand, in the department Haute-Garonne), as the community
of the "congregated" (-convenae-).  The Roman emblems of victory
were erected at the summit of the pass of the Pyrenees;
at the close of 683, Metellus and Pompeius marched with their armies
through the streets of the capital, to present the thanks
of the nation to Father Jovis at the Capitol for the conquest
of the Spaniards.  The good fortune of Sulla seemed still to be
with his creation after he had been laid in the grave, and to protect it
better than the incapable and negligent watchmen appointed to guard
it.  The opposition in Italy had broken down from the incapacity
and precipitation of its leader, and that of the emigrants
from dissension within their own ranks.  These defeats,
although far more the result of their own perverseness and discordance
than of the exertions of their opponents, were yet so many victories
for the oligarchy.  The curule chairs were rendered once more secure.




Chapter II

Rule of the Sullan Restoration

External Relations

When the suppression of the Cinnan revolution, which threatened
the very existence of the senate, rendered it possible for the restored
senatorial government to devote once more the requisite attention
to the internal and external security of the empire, there emerged
affairs enough, the settlement of which could not be postponed
without injuring the most important interests and allowing
present inconveniences to grow into future dangers.  Apart from
the very serious complications in Spain, it was absolutely necessary
effectually to check the barbarians in Thrace and the regions
of the Danube, whom Sulla on his march through Macedonia had only
been able superficially to chastise,(1) and to regulate, by military
intervention, the disorderly state of things along the northern
frontier of the Greek peninsula; thoroughly to suppress
the bands of pirates infesting the seas everywhere, but especially
the eastern waters; and lastly to introduce better order
into the unsettled relations of Asia Minor.  The peace which Sulla
had concluded in 670 with Mithradates, king of Pontus,(2)
and of which the treaty with Murena in 673(3) was essentially
a repetition, bore throughout the stamp of a provisional arrangement
to meet the exigencies of the moment; and the relations of the Romans
with Tigranes, king of Armenia, with whom they had de facto waged war,
remained wholly untouched in this peace.  Tigranes had with right
regarded this as a tacit permission to bring the Roman possessions
in Asia under his power.  If these were not to be abandoned, it
was necessary to come to terms amicably or by force with the new
great-king of Asia.

In the preceding chapter we have described the movements
in Italy and Spain connected with the proceedings of the democracy,
and their subjugation by the senatorial government.  In the present
chapter we shall review the external government, as the authorities
installed by Sulla conducted or failed to conduct it.

Dalmato-Macedonian Expeditions

We still recognize the vigorous hand of Sulla in the energetic measures
which, in the last period of his regency, the senate adopted almost
simultaneously against the Sertorians, the Dalmatians and Thracians,
and the Cilician pirates.

The expedition to the Graeco-Illyrian peninsula was designed partly
to reduce to subjection or at least to tame the barbarous tribes
who ranged over the whole interior from the Black Sea to the Adriatic,
and of whom the Bessi (in the great Balkan) especially were,
as it was then said, notorious as robbers even among a race
of robbers; partly to destroy the corsairs in their haunts,
especially along the Dalmatian coast.  As usual, the attack took
place simultaneously from Dalmatia and from Macedonia, in which
province an army of five legions was assembled for the purpose.
In Dalmatia the former praetor Gaius Cosconius held the command,
marched through the country in all directions, and took by storm
the fortress of Salona after a two years' siege.  In Macedonia
the proconsul Appius Claudius (676-678) first attempted along
the Macedono-Thracian frontier to make himself master of the mountain
districts on the left bank of the Karasu.  On both sides the war
was conducted with savage ferocity; the Thracians destroyed
the townships which they took and massacred their captives,
and the Romans returned like for like.  But no results of importance
were attained; the toilsome marches and the constant conflicts
with the numerous and brave inhabitants of the mountains decimated
the army to no purpose; the general himself sickened and died.
His successor, Gaius Scribonius Curio (679-681), was induced
by various obstacles, and particularly by a not inconsiderable
military revolt, to desist from the difficult expedition
against the Thracians, and to turn himself instead to the northern
frontier of Macedonia, where he subdued the weaker Dardani (in Servia)
and reached as far as the Danube.  The brave and able Marcus Lucullus
(682, 683) was the first who again advanced eastward, defeated the Bessi
in their mountains, took their capital Uscudama (Adrianople),
and compelled them to submit to the Roman supremacy.  Sadalas king
of the Odrysians, and the Greek towns on the east coast to the north
and south of the Balkan chain--Istropolis, Tomi, Callatis,
Odessus (near Varna), Mesembria, and others--became dependent
on the Romans.  Thrace, of which the Romans had hitherto held little
more than the Attalic possessions on the Chersonese, now became
a portion--though far from obedient--of the province of Macedonia.

Piracy

But the predatory raids of the Thracians and Dardani, confined
as they were to a small part of the empire, were far less injurious
to the state and to individuals than the evil of piracy,
which was continually spreading farther and acquiring
more solid organization.  The commerce of the whole Mediterranean
was in its power.  Italy could neither export its products nor import
grain from the provinces; in the former the people were starving,
in the latter the cultivation of the corn-fields ceased for want
of a vent for the produce.  No consignment of money, no traveller
was longer safe: the public treasury suffered most serious losses;
a great many Romans of standing were captured by the corsairs,
and compelled to pay heavy sums for their ransom, if it was not even
the pleasure of the pirates to execute on individuals the sentence
of death, which in that case was seasoned with a savage humour.
The merchants, and even the divisions of Roman troops destined
for the east, began to postpone their voyages chiefly to the unfavourable
season of the year, and to be less afraid of the winter storms
than of the piratical vessels, which indeed even at this season
did not wholly disappear from the sea.  But severely as the closing
of the sea was felt, it was more tolerable than the raids
made on the islands and coasts of Greece and Asia Minor.
Just as afterwards in the time of the Normans, piratical squadrons
ran up to the maritime towns, and either compelled them to buy
themselves off with large sums, or besieged and took them by storm.
When Samothrace, Clazomenae, Samos, Iassus were pillaged
by the pirates (670) under the eyes of Sulla after peace was concluded
with Mithradates, we may conceive how matters went where neither
a Roman army nor a Roman fleet was at hand.  All the old rich temples
along the coasts of Greece and Asia Minor were plundered
one after another; from Samothrace alone a treasure of 1000 talents
(240,000 pounds) is said to have been carried off.  Apollo, according
to a Roman poet of this period, was so impoverished by the pirates that,
when the swallow paid him a visit, he could no longer produce
to it out of all his treasures even a drachm of gold.  More than four
hundred townships were enumerated as having been taken or laid
under contribution by the pirates, including cities like Cnidus,
Samos, Colophon; from not a few places on islands or the coast,
which were previously flourishing, the whole population migrated,
that they might not be carried off by the pirates.  Even inland
districts were no longer safe from their attacks; there were instances
of their assailing townships distant one or two days' march
from the coast.  The fearful debt, under which subsequently
all the communities of the Greek east succumbed, proceeded
in great part from these fatal times.

Organization of Piracy

Piracy had totally changed its character.  The pirates
were no longer bold freebooters, who levied their tribute
from the large Italo-Oriental traffic in slaves and luxuries,
as it passed through the Cretan waters between Cyrene
and the Peloponnesus--in the language of the pirates the "golden sea";
no longer even armed slave-catchers, who prosecuted "war, trade,
and piracy" equally side by side; they formed now a piratical state,
with a peculiar esprit de corps, with a solid and very respectable
organization, with a home of their own and the germs of a symmachy,
and doubtless also with definite political designs.  The pirates
called themselves Cilicians; in fact their vessels were the rendezvous
of desperadoes and adventurers from all countries--discharged
mercenaries from the recruiting-grounds of Crete, burgesses
from the destroyed townships of Italy, Spain, and Asia, soldiers
and officers from the armies of Fimbria and Sertorius, in a word
the ruined men of all nations, the hunted refugees of all vanquished
parties, every one that was wretched and daring--and where was there not
misery and outrage in this unhappy age? It was no longer
a gang of robbers who had flocked together, but a compact soldier-
state, in which the freemasonry of exile and crime took the place
of nationality, and within which crime redeemed itself, as it so often
does in its own eyes, by displaying the most generous public spirit.
In an abandoned age, when cowardice and insubordination
had relaxed all the bonds of social order, the legitimate commonwealths
might have taken a pattern from this state--the mongrel offspring
of distress and violence--within which alone the inviolable
determination to stand side by side, the sense of comradeship,
respect for the pledged word and the self-chosen chiefs, valour
and adroitness seemed to have taken refuge.  If the banner of this state
was inscribed with vengeance against the civil society which,
rightly or wrongly, had ejected its members, it might be a question
whether this device was much worse than those of the Italian oligarchy
and the Oriental sultanship which seemed in the fair way of dividing
the world between them.  The corsairs at least felt themselves
on a level with any legitimate state; their robber-pride,
their robber-pomp, and their robber-humour are attested by many
a genuine pirate's tale of mad merriment and chivalrous bandittism:
they professed, and made it their boast, to live at righteous war
with all the world: what they gained in that warfare was designated
not as plunder, but as military spoil; and, while the captured corsair
was sure of the cross in every Roman seaport, they too claimed
the right of executing any of their captives.

Its Military-Political Power

Their military-political organization, especially since
the Mithradatic war, was compact.  Their ships, for the most part
-myopiarones-, that is, small open swift-sailing barks,
with a smaller proportion of biremes and triremes, now regularly sailed
associated in squadrons and under admirals, whose barges were wont
to glitter in gold and purple.  To a comrade in peril,
though he might be totally unknown, no pirate captain refused
the requested aid; an agreement concluded with any one of them
was absolutely recognized by the whole society, and any injury inflicted
on one was avenged by all.  Their true home was the sea from the pillars
of Hercules to the Syrian and Egyptian waters; the refuges
which they needed for themselves and their floating houses
on the mainland were readily furnished to them by the Mauretanian
and Dalmatian coasts, by the island of Crete, and, above all,
by the southern coast of Asia Minor, which abounded in headlands
and lurking-places, commanded the chief thoroughfare of the maritime
commerce of that age, and was virtually without a master.
The league of Lycian cities there, and the Pamphylian communities,
were of little importance; the Roman station, which had existed
in Cilicia since 652, was far from adequate to command the extensive
coast; the Syrian dominion over Cilicia had always been
but nominal, and had recently been superseded by the Armenian,
the holder of which, as a true great-king, gave himself no concern
at all about the sea and readily abandoned it to the pillage
of the Cilicians.  It was nothing wonderful, therefore,
that the corsairs flourished there as they had never done anywhere else.
Not only did they possess everywhere along the coast signal-places
and stations, but further inland--in the most remote recesses
of the impassable and mountainous interior of Lycia, Pamphylia,
and Cilicia--they had built their rock-castles, in which they concealed
their wives, children, and treasures during their own absence
at sea, and, doubtless, in times of danger found an asylum themselves.
Great numbers of such corsair-castles existed especially
in the Rough Cilicia, the forests of which at the same time furnished
the pirates with the most excellent timber for shipbuilding; and there,
accordingly, their principal dockyards and arsenals were situated.
It was not to be wondered at that this organized military state
gained a firm body of clients among the Greek maritime cities,
which were more or less left to themselves and managed their own
affairs: these cities entered into traffic with the pirates
as with a friendly power on the basis of definite treaties,
and did not comply with the summons of the Roman governors to furnish
vessels against them.  The not inconsiderable town of Side
in Pamphylia, for instance, allowed the pirates to build ships
on its quays, and to sell the free men whom they had captured
in its market.

Such a society of pirates was a political power; and as a political
power it gave itself out and was accepted from the time
when the Syrian king Tryphon first employed it as such and rested
his throne on its support.(4)  We find the pirates as allies of king
Mithradates of Pontus as well as of the Roman democratic emigrants;
we find them giving battle to the fleets of Sulla in the eastern
and in the western waters; we find individual pirate princes ruling
over a series of considerable coast towns.  We cannot tell how far
the internal political development of this floating state had
already advanced; but its arrangements undeniably contained
the germ of a sea-kingdom, which was already beginning to establish
itself, and out of which, under favourable circumstances,
a permanent state might have been developed.

Nullity of the Roman Marine Police

This state of matters clearly shows, as we have partly indicated
already,(5) how the Romans kept--or rather did not keep--order
on "their sea."  The protectorate of Rome over the provinces
consisted essentially in military guardianship; the provincials
paid tax or tribute to the Romans for their defence by sea and land,
which was concentrated in Roman hands.  But never, perhaps,
did a guardian more shamelessly defraud his ward than the Roman
oligarchy defrauded the subject communities.  Instead of Rome equipping
a general fleet for the empire and centralizing her marine police,
the senate permitted the unity of her maritime superintendence--
without which in this matter nothing could at all be done--to fall
into abeyance, and left it to each governor and each client state
to defend themselves against the pirates as each chose and was able.
Instead of Rome providing for the fleet, as she had bound herself
to do, exclusively with her own blood and treasure and with those
of the client states which had remained formally sovereign,
the senate allowed the Italian war-marine to fall into decay,
and learned to make shift with the vessels which the several
mercantile towns were required to furnish, or still more frequently
with the coast-guards everywhere organized--all the cost
and burden falling, in either case, on the subjects.  The provincials
might deem themselves fortunate, if their Roman governor applied
the requisitions which he raised for the defence of the coast
in reality solely to that object, and did not intercept them
for himself; or if they were not, as very frequently happened, called
on to pay ransom for some Roman of rank captured by the buccaneers.
Measures undertaken perhaps with judgment, such as the occupation
of Cilicia in 652, were sure to be spoilt in the execution.
Any Roman of this period, who was not wholly carried away
by the current intoxicating idea of the national greatness, must have
wished that the ships' beaks might be torn down from the orator's
platform in the Forum, that at least he might not be constantly
reminded by them of the naval victories achieved in better times.

Expedition to the South Coast of Asia Minor
Publius Servilius Isauricus
Zenicetes Vanquished
The Isaurians Subdued

Nevertheless Sulla, who in the war against Mithradates had
the opportunity of acquiring an adequate conviction of the dangers
which the neglect of the fleet involved, took various steps
seriously to check the evil.  It is true that the instructions
which he had left to the governors whom he appointed in Asia,
to equip in the maritime towns a fleet against the pirates, had borne
little fruit, for Murena preferred to begin war with Mithradates,
and Gnaeus Dolabella, the governor of Cilicia, proved wholly
incapable.  Accordingly the senate resolved in 675 to send one
of the consuls to Cilicia; the lot fell on the capable Publius
Servilius.  He defeated the piratical fleet in a bloody engagement,
and then applied himself to destroy those towns on the south coast
of Asia Minor which served them as anchorages and trading stations.
The fortresses of the powerful maritime prince Zenicetes--Olympus,
Corycus, Phaselis in eastern Lycia, Attalia in Pamphylia--
were reduced, and the prince himself met his death in the flames
of his stronghold Olympus.  A movement was next made against
the Isaurians, who in the north-west corner of the Rough Cilicia,
on the northern slope of Mount Taurus, inhabited a labyrinth
of steep mountain ridges, jagged rocks, and deeply-cut valleys,
covered with magnificent oak forests--a region which is even
at the present day filled with reminiscences of the old robber times.
To reduce these Isaurian fastnesses, the last and most secure retreats
ofthe freebooters, Servilius led the first Roman army over the Taurus,
and broke up the strongholds of the enemy, Oroanda, and above all
Isaura itself--the ideal of a robber-town, situated on the summit
of a scarcely accessible mountain-ridge, and completely overlooking
and commanding the wide plain of Iconium.  The war, not ended
till 679, from which Publius Servilius acquired for himself
and his descendants the surname of Isauricus, was not without fruit;
a great number of pirates and piratical vessels fell in consequence
of it into the power of the Romans; Lycia, Pamphylia, West Cilicia
were severely devastated, the territories of the destroyed towns
were confiscated, and the province of Cilicia was enlarged by their
addition to it.  But, in the nature of the case, piracy was far
from being suppressed by these measures; on the contrary, it simply
betook itself for the time to other regions, and particularly
to Crete, the oldest harbour for the corsairs of the Mediterranean.(6)
Nothing but repressive measures carried out on a large scale
and with unity of purpose--nothing, in fact, but the establishment
of a standing maritime police--could in such a case
afford thorough relief.

Asiatic Relations
Tigranes and the New Great-Kingdom of Armenia

The affairs of the mainland of Asia Minor were connected by various
relations with this maritime war.  The variance which existed
between Rome and the kings of Pontus and Armenia did not abate,
but increased more and more.  On the one hand Tigranes,
kingof Armenia, pursued his aggressive conquests in the most reckless
manner.  The Parthians, whose state was at this period torn
by internal dissensions and enfeebled, were by constant hostilities
driven farther and farther back into the interior of Asia.
Of the countries between Armenia, Mesopotamia, and Iran, the kingdoms
of Corduene (northern Kurdistan), and Media Atropatene (Azerbijan),
were converted from Parthian into Armenian fiefs, and the kingdom
of Nineveh (Mosul), or Adiabene, was likewise compelled, at least
temporarily, to become a dependency of Armenia.  In Mesopotamia,
too, particularly in and around Nisibis, the Armenian rule
was established; but the southern half, which was in great part desert,
seems not to have passed into the firm possession of the new great-
king, and Seleucia, on the Tigris, in particular, appears not to have
become subject to him.  The kingdom of Edessa or Osrhoene
he handed over to a tribe of wandering Arabs, which he transplanted
from southern Mesopotamia and settled in this region, with the view
of commanding by its means the passage of the Euphrates
and the great route of traffic.(7)

Cappadocia Armenian

But Tigranes by no means confined his conquests to the eastern
bank of the Euphrates.  Cappadocia especially was the object
of his attacks, and, defenceless as it was, suffered destructive
blows from its too potent neighbour.  Tigranes wrested the eastern
province Melitene from Cappadocia, and united it with the opposite
Armenian province Sophene, by which means he obtained command
of the passage of the Euphrates with the great thoroughfare
of traffic between Asia Minor and Armenia.  After the death of Sulla
the Armenians even advanced into Cappadocia proper, and carried off
to Armenia the inhabitants of the capital Mazaca (afterwards Caesarea)
and eleven other towns of Greek organization.

Syria under Tigranes

Nor could the kingdom of the Seleucids, already in full course
of dissolution, oppose greater resistance to the new great-king.
Here the south from the Egyptian frontier to Straton's Tower
(Caesarea) was under the rule of the Jewish prince Alexander Jannaeus,
who extended and strengthened his dominion step by step
in conflict with his Syrian, Egyptian, and Arabic neighbours
and with the imperial cities.  The larger towns of Syria--Gaza,
Straton's Tower, Ptolemais, Beroea--attempted to maintain themselves
on their own footing, sometimes as free communities, sometimes
under so-called tyrants; the capital, Antioch, in particular,
was virtually independent.  Damascus and the valleys of Lebanon
had submitted to the Nabataean prince, Aretas of Petra.  Lastly,
in Cilicia the pirates or the Romans bore sway.  And for this crown
breaking into a thousand fragments the Seleucid princes continued
perseveringly to quarrel with each other, as though it were their object
to make royalty a jest and an offence to all; nay more,
while this family, doomed like the house of Laius to perpetual discord,
had its own subjects all in revolt, it even raised claims to the throne
of Egypt vacant by the decease of king Alexander II without heirs.
Accordingly king Tigranes set to work there without ceremony.
Eastern Cilicia was easily subdued by him, and the citizens of Soli
and other towns were carried off, just like the Cappadocians,
to Armenia.  In like manner the province of Upper Syria,
withthe exception of the bravely-defended town of Seleucia at the mouth
of the Orontes, and the greater part of Phoenicia were reduced
by force; Ptolemais was occupied by the Armenians about 680,
and the Jewish state was already seriously threatened by them.  Antioch,
the old capital of the Seleucids, became one of the residences
of the great-king.  Already from 671, the year following the peace
between Sulla and Mithradates, Tigranes is designated
in the Syrian annals as the sovereign of the country, and Cilicia
and Syria appear as an Armenian satrapy under Magadates,
the lieutenant of the great-king.  The age of the kings of Nineveh,
ofthe Salmanezers and Sennacheribs, seemed to be renewed; again oriental
despotism pressed heavily on the trading population of the Syrian
coast, as it did formerly on Tyre and Sidon; again great states
of the interior threw themselves on the provinces along
the Mediterranean; again Asiatic hosts, said to number
half a million combatants, appeared on the Cilician and Syrian coasts.
As Salmanezer and Nebuchadnezzar had formerly carried the Jews
to Babylon, so now from all the frontier provinces of the new
kingdom--from Corduene, Adiabene, Assyria, Cilicia, Cappadocia--
the inhabitants, especially the Greek or half-Greek citizens
of the towns, were compelled to settle with their whole goods
and chattels (under penalty of the confiscation of everything
that they left behind) in the new capital, one of those gigantic cities
proclaiming rather the nothingness of the people than the greatness
of the rulers, which sprang up in the countries of the Euphrates
on every change in the supreme sovereignty at the fiat of the new
grand sultan.  The new "city of Tigranes," Tigrano-certa, founded
on the borders of Armenia and Mesopotamia, and destined
as the capital of the territories newly acquired for Armenia, became
a city like Nineveh and Babylon, with walls fifty yards high,
and the appendages of palace, garden, and park that were appropriate
to sultanism.  In other respects, too, the new great-king proved
faithful to his part.  As amidst the perpetual childhood
of the east the childlike conceptions of kings with real crowns
on their heads have never disappeared, Tigranes, when he showed
himselfin public, appeared in the state and the costume of a successor
of Darius and Xerxes, with the purple caftan, the half-white
half-purple tunic, the long plaited trousers, the high turban,
and the royal diadem--attended moreover and served in slavish fashion,
wherever he went or stood, by four "kings."

Mithradates

King Mithradates acted with greater moderation.  He refrained
from aggressions in Asia Minor, and contented himself with--
what no treaty forbade--placing his dominion along the Black Sea
ona firmer basis, and gradually bringing into more definite dependence
the regions which separated the Bosporan kingdom, now ruled
under his supremacy by his son Machares, from that of Pontus.
But he too applied every effort to render his fleet and army efficient,
and especially to arm and organize the latter after the Roman model;
in which the Roman emigrants, who sojourned in great numbers
at his court, rendered essential service.

Demeanor of the Romans in the East
Egypt not Annexed

The Romans had no desire to become further involved in Oriental
affairs than they were already.  This appears with striking
clearness in the fact, that the opportunity, which at this time
presented itself, of peacefully bringing the kingdom of Egypt
under the immediate dominion of Rome was spurned by the senate.
The legitimate descendants of Ptolemaeus son of Lagus had come
to an end, when the king installed by Sulla after the death of Ptolemaeus
Soter II Lathyrus--Alexander II, a son of Alexander I--was killed,
a few days after he had ascended the throne, on occasion of a tumult
in the capital (673).  This Alexander had in his testament(8) appointed
the Roman community his heir.  The genuineness of this document
was no doubt disputed; but the senate acknowledged it by assuming
in virtue of it the sums deposited in Tyre on account of the deceased king.
Nevertheless it allowed two notoriously illegitimate sons of king Lathyrus,
Ptolemaeus XI, who was styled the new Dionysos or the Flute-blower
(Auletes), and Ptolemaeus the Cyprian, to take practical possession
of Egypt and Cyprus respectively.  They were not indeed expressly
recognized by the senate, but no distinct summons to surrender
their kingdoms was addressed to them.  The reason why the senate allowed
this state of uncertainty to continue, and did not commit itself
to a definite renunciation of Egypt and Cyprus, was undoubtedly
the considerable rent which these kings, ruling as it were on sufferance,
regularly paid for the continuance of the uncertainty to the heads
of the Roman coteries.  But the motive for waiving that attractive
acquisition altogether was different.  Egypt, by its peculiar
position and its financial organization, placed in the hands
of any governor commanding it a pecuniary and naval power and generally
an independent authority, which were absolutely incompatible
with the suspicious and feeble government of the oligarchy:
in this point of view it was judicious to forgo the direct possession
of the country of the Nile.

Non-Intervention in Asia Minor and Syria

Less justifiable was the failure of the senate to interfere directly
in the affairs of Asia Minor and Syria.  The Roman government did not
indeed recognize the Armenian conqueror as king of Cappadocia
and Syria; but it did nothing to drive him back, although the war,
which under pressure of necessity it began in 676 against the pirates
in Cilicia, naturally suggested its interference more especially
in Syria.  In fact, by tolerating the loss of Cappadocia and Syria
without declaring war, the government abandoned not merely
those committed to its protection, but the most important
foundations of its own powerful position.  It adopted
a hazardous course, when it sacrificed the outworks of its dominion
in the Greek settlements and kingdoms on the Euphrates
and Tigris; but, when it allowed the Asiatics to establish
themselves on the Mediterranean which was the political
basis of its empire, this was not a proof of love of peace,
but a confession that the oligarchy had been rendered by the Sullan
restoration more oligarchical doubtless, but neither wiser
nor more energetic, and it was for Rome's place as a power
in the world the beginning of the end.

On the other side, too, there was no desire for war.  Tigranes
had no reason to wish it, when Rome even without war abandoned
to him all its allies.  Mithradates, who was no mere sultan and had
enjoyed opportunity enough, amidst good and bad fortune, of gaining
experience regarding friends and foes, knew very well that in a second
Roman war he would very probably stand quite as much alone
as in the first, and that he could follow no more prudent course
than to keep quiet and to strengthen his kingdom in the interior.
That he was in earnest with his peaceful declarations, he had
sufficiently proved in the conference with Murena.(9)  He continued
to avoid everything which would compel the Roman government
to abandon its passive attitude.

Apprehensions of Rome

But as the first Mithradatic war had arisen without any of the partie
properly desiring it, so now there grew out of the opposition
of interests mutual suspicion, and out of this suspicion
mutual preparations for defence; and these, by their very gravity,
ultimately led to an open breach.  That distrust of her own readiness
to fight and preparation for fighting, which had for long governed
the policy of Rome--a distrust, which the want of standing armies
and the far from exemplary character of the collegiate rule
render sufficiently intelligible--made it, as it were, an axiom
of her policy to pursue every war not merely to the vanquishing,
but to the annihilation of her opponent; in this point of view
the Romans were from the outset as little content with the peace
of Sulla, as they had formerly been with the terms which Scipio
Africanus had granted to the Carthaginians.  The apprehension often
expressed that a second attack by the Pontic king was imminent,
was in some measure justified by the singular resemblance between
the present circumstances and those which existed twelve years before.
Once more a dangerous civil war coincided with serious armaments
of Mithradates; once more the Thracians overran Macedonia,
and piratical fleets covered the Mediterranean; emissaries were coming
and going--as formerly between Mithradates and the Italians--
so now between the Roman emigrants in Spain and those at the court
of Sinope.  As early as the beginning of 677 it was declared
in the senate that the king was only waiting for the opportunity
of falling upon Roman Asia during the Italian civil war;
the Roman armies in Asia and Cilicia were reinforced
to meet possible emergencies.

Apprehensions of Mithradates
Bithynia Roman
Cyrene a Roman Province
Outbreak of the Mithradatic War

Mithradates on his part followed with growing apprehension
the development of the Roman policy.  He could not but feel
that a war between the Romans and Tigranes, however much
the feeble senate might dread it, was in the long run almost inevitable,
and that he would not be able to avoid taking part in it.  His attempt
to obtain from the Roman senate the documentary record of the terms
of peace, which was still wanting, had fallen amidst the disturbances
attending the revolution of Lepidus and remained without result;
Mithradates found in this an indication of the impending renewal
of the conflict.  The expedition against the pirates, which indirectly
concerned also the kings of the east whose allies they were,
seemed the preliminary to such a war.  Still more suspicious
were the claims which Rome held in suspense over Egypt and Cyprus:
it is significant that the king of Pontus betrothed his two daughters
Mithradatis and Nyssa to the two Ptolemies, to whom the senate
continued to refuse recognition.  The emigrants urged him
to strike: the position of Sertorius in Spain, as to which Mithradates
despatched envoys under convenient pretexts to the headquarters
of Pompeius to obtain information, and which was about this very time
really imposing, opened up to the king the prospect of fighting
not, as in the first Roman war, against both the Roman parties,
but in concert with the one against the other.  A more favourable
moment could hardly be hoped for, and after all it was always
better to declare war than to let it be declared against him.
In 679 Nicomedes III Philopator king of Bithynia, died, and as
the last of his race--for a son borne by Nysa was, or was said
to be, illegitimate--left his kingdom by testament to the Romans,
who delayed not to take possession of this region bordering
on the Roman province and long ago filled with Roman officials
and merchants.  At the same time Cyrene, which had been already
bequeathed to the Romans in 658,(10) was at length constituted
a province, and a Roman governor was sent thither (679).  These
measures, in connection with the attacks carried out about
the same time against the pirates on the south coast of Asia Minor,
must have excited apprehensions in the king; the annexation of Bithynia
in particular made the Romans immediate neighbours of the Pontic
kingdom; and this, it may be presumed, turned the scale.  The king
took the decisive step and declared war against the Romans
in the winter of 679-680.

Preparations of Mithradates

Gladly would Mithradates have avoided undertaking so arduous a work
singlehanded.  His nearest and natural ally was the great-king
Tigranes; but that shortsighted man declined the proposal of his
father-in-law.  So there remained only the insurgents and the pirates.
Mithradates was careful to place himself in communication
with both, by despatching strong squadrons to Spain and to Crete.
A formal treaty was concluded with Sertorius,(11) by which Rome
ceded to the king Bithynia, Paphlagonia, Galatia, and Cappadocia--
all of them, it is true, acquisitions which needed to be ratified
on the field of battle.  More important was the support
which the Spanish general gave to the king, by sending Roman officers
to lead his armies and fleets.  The most active of the emigrants
inthe east, Lucius Magius and Lucius Fannius, were appointed by Sertorius
as his representatives at the court of Sinope.  From the pirates
also came help; they flocked largely to the kingdom of Pontus,
and by their means especially the king seems to have succeeded
in forming a naval force imposing by the number as well as
by the quality of the ships.  His main support still lay in his
own forces, with which the king hoped, before the Romans should arrive
in Asia, to make himself master of their possessions there;
especially as the financial distress produced in the province
of Asia by the Sullan war-tribute, the aversion of Bithynia towards
the new Roman government, and the elements of combustion left
behind by the desolating war recently brought to a close in Cilicia
and Pamphylia, opened up favourable prospects to a Pontic invasion.
There was no lack of stores; 2,000,000 -medimni- of grain lay
in the royal granaries.  The fleet and the men were numerous and well
exercised, particularly the Bastarnian mercenaries, a select corps
which was a match even for Italian legionaries.  On this occasion
also it was the king who took the offensive.  A corps under Diophantus
advanced into Cappadocia, to occupy the fortresses there
and to close the way to the kingdom of Pontus against the Romans;
the leader sent by Sertorius, the propraetor Marcus Marius,
went in company with the Pontic officer Eumachus to Phrygia, with a view
to rouse the Roman province and the Taurus mountains to revolt;
the main army, above 100,000 men with 16,000 cavalry and 100
scythe-chariots, led by Taxiles and Hermocrates under the personal
superintendence of the king, and the war-fleet of 400 sail
commanded by Aristonicus, moved along the north coast of Asia Minor
to occupy Paphlagonia and Bithynia.

Roman Preparations

On the Roman side there was selected for the conduct of the war
in the first rank the consul of 680, Lucius Lucullus, who as governor
of Asia and Cilicia was placed at the head of the four legions
stationed in Asia Minor and of a fifth brought by him from Italy,
and was directed to penetrate with this army, amounting to 30,000
infantry and 1600 cavalry, through Phrygia into the kingdom
of Pontus.  His colleague Marcus Cotta proceeded with the fleet
and another Roman corps to the Propontis, to cover Asia and Bithynia.
Lastly, a general arming of the coasts and particularly
of the Thracian coast more immediately threatened by the Pontic fleet,
was enjoined; and the task of clearing all the seas and coasts
from the pirates and their Pontic allies was, by extraordinary decree,
entrusted to a single magistrate, the choice falling on the praetor
Marcus Antonius, the son of the man who thirty years before had
first chastised the Cilician corsairs.(12)  Moreover, the senate
placed at the disposal of Lucullus a sum of 72,000,000 sesterces
(700,000 pounds), in order to build a fleet; which, however,
Lucullus declined.  From all this we see that the Roman government
recognized the root of the evil in the neglect of their marine,
and showed earnestness in the matter at least so far as
their decrees reached.

Beginning of the War

Thus the war began in 680 at all points.  It was a misfortune
for Mithradates, that at the very moment of his declaring war
the Sertorian struggle reached its crisis, by which one of his
principal hopes was from the outset destroyed, and the Roman
government was enabled to apply its whole power to the maritime
and Asiatic contest.  In Asia Minor on the other hand Mithradates
reaped the advantages of the offensive, and of the great distance
of the Romans from the immediate seat of war.  A considerable
number of cities in Asia Minor opened their gates to the Sertorian
propraetor who was placed at the head of the Roman province,
and they massacred, as in 666, the Roman families settled among them:
the Pisidians, Isaurians, and Cilicians took up arms against Rome.
The Romans for the moment had no troops at the points threatened.
Individual energetic men attempted no doubt at their own hand
to check this mutiny of the provincials; thus on receiving accounts
of these events the young Gaius Caesar left Rhodes where he was staying
on account of his studies, and with a hastily-collected
band opposed himself to the insurgents; but not much could be
effected by such volunteer corps.  Had not Deiotarus, the brave
tetrarch of the Tolistobogii--a Celtic tribe settled around
Pessinus--embraced the side of the Romans and fought with success
against the Pontic generals, Lucullus would have had to begin with
recapturing the interior of the Roman province from the enemy.
But even as it was, he lost in pacifying the province and driving
back the enemy precious time, for which the slight successes
achieved by his cavalry were far from affording compensation.
Still more unfavourable than in Phrygia was the aspect of things
for the Romans on the north coast of Asia Minor.  Here the great
Pontic army and the fleet had completely mastered Bithynia,
and compelled the Roman consul Cotta to take shelter with his
far from numerous force and his ships within the walls
and port of Chalcedon, where Mithradates kept them blockaded.

The Romans Defeated at Chalcedon

This blockade, however, was so far a favourable event
for the Romans, as, if Cotta detained the Pontic army before Chalcedon
and Lucullus proceeded also thither, the whole Roman forces might unite
at Chalcedon and compel the decision of arms there rather than
in the distant and impassable region of Pontus.  Lucullus did take
the route for Chalcedon; but Cotta, with the view of executing a great
feat at his own hand before the arrival of his colleague, ordered
his admiral Publius Rutilius Nudus to make a sally, which not only
ended in a bloody defeat of the Romans, but also enabled the Pontic
force to attack the harbour, to break the chain which closed it,
and to burn all the Roman vessels of war which were there, nearly
seventy in number.  On the news of these misfortunes reaching
Lucullus at the river Sangarius, he accelerated his march
to the great discontent of his soldiers, in whose opinion Cotta
was of no moment, and who would far rather have plundered an undefended
country than have taught their comrades to conquer.  His arrival
made up in part for the misfortunes sustained: the king raised
the siege of Chalcedon, but did not retreat to Pontus; he went
southward into the old Roman province, where he spread his army
along the Propontis and the Hellespont, occupied Lampsacus,
and began to besiege the large and wealthy town of Cyzicus.
He thus entangled himself more and more deeply in the blind alley
which he had chosen to enter, instead of--which alone promised success
for him--bringing the wide distances into play against the Romans.

Mithradates Besieges Cyzicus

In few places had the old Hellenic adroitness and aptitude
preserved themselves so pure as in Cyzicus; its citizens, although
they had suffered great loss of ships and men in the unfortunate
double battle of Chalcedon, made the most resolute resistance.
Cyzicus lay on an island directly opposite the mainland
and connected with it by a bridge.  The besiegers possessed themselves
not only of the line of heights on the mainland terminating at the bridge
and of the suburb situated there, but also of the celebrated
Dindymene heights on the island itself; and alike on the mainland
and on the island the Greek engineers put forth all their art
to pave the way for an assault.  But the breach which they at length
made was closed again during the night by the besieged,
and the exertions of the royal army remained as fruitless as did
the barbarous threat of the king to put to death the captured Cyzicenes
before the walls, if the citizens still refused to surrender.
The Cyzicenes continued the defence with courage and success;
they fell little short of capturing the king himself
in the course of the siege.

Destruction of the Pontic Army

Meanwhile Lucullus had possessed himself of a very strong position
in rear of the Pontic army, which, although not permitting him
directly to relieve the hard-pressed city, gave him the means
of cutting off all supplies by land from the enemy.  Thus the enormous
army of Mithradates, estimated with the camp-followers at 300,000
persons, was not in a position either to fight or to march, firmly
wedged in between the impregnable city and the immoveable Roman
army, and dependent for all its supplies solely on the sea,
which fortunately for the Pontic troops was exclusively commanded
by their fleet.  But the bad season set in; a storm destroyed a great
part of the siege-works; the scarcity of provisions and above all
of fodder for the horses began to become intolerable.  The beasts
of burden and the baggage were sent off under convoy of the greater
portion of the Pontic cavalry, with orders to steal away or break
through at any cost; but at the river Rhyndacus, to the east
of Cyzicus, Lucullus overtook them and cut to pieces the whole body.
Another division of cavalry under Metrophanes and Lucius Fannius
was obliged, after wandering long in the west of Asia Minor,
to return to the camp before Cyzicus.  Famine and disease made
fearful ravages in the Pontic ranks.  When spring came on (681),
the besieged redoubled their exertions and took the trenches
constructed on Dindymon: nothing remained for the king but to raise
the siege and with the aid of his fleet to save what he could.
He went in person with the fleet to the Hellespont, but suffered
considerable loss partly at its departure, partly through storms
on the voyage.  The land army under Hermaeus and Marius likewise
set out thither, with the view of embarking at Lampsacus
under the protection of its walls.  They left behind their baggage
as well as the sick and wounded, who were all put to death
by the exasperated Cyzicenes.  Lucullus inflicted on them
very considerable loss by the way at the passage of the rivers
Aesepus and Granicus; but they attained their object.  The Pontic ships
carried off the remains of the great army and the citizens of Lampsacus
themselves beyond the reach of the Romans.

Maritime War
Mithradates Driven Back to Pontus

The consistent and discreet conduct of the war by Lucullus
had not only repaired the errors of his colleague, but had also
destroyed without a pitched battle the flower of the enemy's army--
it was said 200,000 soldiers.  Had he still possessed the fleet
which was burnt in the harbour of Chalcedon, he would have annihilated
the whole army of his opponent.  As it was, the work of destruction
continued incomplete; and while he was obliged to remain passive,
the Pontic fleet notwithstanding the disaster of Cyzicus took
its station in the Propontis, Perinthus and Byzantium were blockaded
by it on the European coast and Priapus pillaged on the Asiatic,
and the headquarters of the king were established in the Bithynian port
of Nicomedia.  In fact a select squadron of fifty sail,
which carried 10,000 select troops including Marcus Marius
and the flower of the Roman emigrants, sailed forth even into the Aegean;
the report went that it was destined to effect a landing in Italy
and there rekindle the civil war.  But the ships, which Lucullus
after the disaster off Chalcedon had demanded from the Asiatic
communities, began to appear, and a squadron ran forth in pursuit
of the enemy's fleet which had gone into the Aegean.  Lucullus himself,
 experienced as an admiral,(13) took the command.  Thirteen quinqueremes
of the enemy on their voyage to Lemnos, under Isidorus, were assailed
and sunk off the Achaean harbour in the waters between the Trojan coast
and the island of Tenedos.  At the small island of Neae, between Lemnos
and Scyros, at which little-frequented point the Pontic flotilla
of thirty-two sail lay drawn up on the shore, Lucullus found it,
immediately attacked the ships and the crews scattered over the island,
and possessed himself of the whole squadron.  Here Marcus Marius
and the ablest of the Roman emigrants met their death, either in conflict
or subsequently by the axe of the executioner.  The whole Aegean fleet
of the enemy was annihilated by Lucullus.  The war in Bithynia
was meanwhile continued by Cotta and by the legates of Lucullus,
Voconius, Gaius Valerius Triarius, and Barba, with the land army
reinforced by fresh arrivals from Italy, and a squadron collected
in Asia.  Barba captured in the interior Prusias on Olympus and Nicaea
while Triarius along the coast captured Apamea (formerly Myrlea)
and Prusias on the sea (formerly Cius).  They then united for a joint
attack on Mithradates himself in Nicomedia; but the king without
even attempting battle escaped to his ships and sailed homeward,
and in this he was successful only because the Roman admiral Voconius,
who was entrusted with the blockade of the port of Nicomedia,
arrived too late.  On the voyage the important Heraclea was indeed
betrayed to the king and occupied by him; but a storm in these waters
sank more than sixty of, his ships and dispersed the rest; the king
arrived almost alone at Sinope.  The offensive on the part of Mithradates
ended in a complete defeat--not at all honourable, least of all
for the supreme leader--of the Pontic forces by land and sea.

Invasion of Pontus by Lucullus

Lucullus now in turn proceeded to the aggressive.  Triarius
received the command of the fleet, with orders first of all
to blockade the Hellespont and lie in wait for the Pontic ships
returning from Crete and Spain; Cotta was charged with the siege
of Heraclea; the difficult task of providing supplies
was entrusted to the faithful and active princes of the Galatians
and to Ariobarzanes king of Cappadocia; Lucullus himself advanced
in the autumn of 681 into the favoured land of Pontus, which had long
been untrodden by an enemy.  Mithradates, now resolved to maintain
the strictest defensive, retired without giving battle from Sinope
to Amisus, and from Amisus to Cabira (afterwards Neocaesarea,
now Niksar) on the Lycus, a tributary of the Iris; he contented
himself with drawing the enemy after him farther and farther
into the interior, and obstructing their supplies and communications.
Lucullus rapidly followed; Sinope was passed by; the Halys, the old
boundary of the Roman dominion, was crossed and the considerable
towns of Amisus, Eupatoria (on the Iris), and Themiscyra (on
the Thermodon) were invested, till at length winter put an end
to the onward march, though not to the investments of the towns.
The soldiers of Lucullus murmured at the constant advance
which did not allow them to reap the fruits of their exertions,
and at the tedious and--amidst the severity of that season--
burdensome blockades.  But it was not the habit of Lucullus
to listen to such complaints: in the spring of 682 he immediately
advanced against Cabira, leaving behind two legions before Amisus
under Lucius Murena.  The king had made fresh attempts during the winter
to induce the great-king of Armenia to take part in the struggle;
they remained like the former ones fruitless, or led only
to empty promises.  Still less did the Parthians show any desire
to interfere in the forlorn cause.  Nevertheless a considerable army,
chiefly raised by enlistments in Scythia, had again assembled
under Diophantus and Taxiles at Cabira.  The Roman army,
which still numbered only three legions and was decidedly inferior
to the Pontic in cavalry, found itself compelled to avoid as far as
possible the plains, and arrived, not without toil and loss,
by difficult bypaths in the vicinity of Cabira, At this town
the two armies lay for a considerable period confronting each other.
The chief struggle was for supplies, which were on both sides scarce:
for this purpose Mithradates formed the flower of his cavalry
and a division of select infantry under Diophantus and Taxiles
into a flying corps, which was intended to scour the country between
the Lycus and the Halys and to seize the Roman convoys of provisions
coming from Cappadocia.  But the lieutenant of Lucullus, Marcus
Fabius Hadrianus, who escorted such a train, not only completely
defeated the band which lay in wait for him in the defile where it
expected to surprise him, but after being reinforced from the camp
defeated also the army of Diophantus and Taxiles itself, so that it
totally broke up.  It was an irreparable loss for the king,
when his cavalry, on which alone he relied, was thus overthrown.

Victory of Cabira

As soon as he received through the first fugitives that arrived
at Cabira from the field of battle--significantly enough, the beaten
generals themselves--the fatal news, earlier even than Lucullus
got tidings of the victory, he resolved on an immediate
farther retreat.  But the resolution taken by the king spread
with the rapidity of lightning among those immediately around him; and,
when the soldiers saw the confidants of the king packing in all haste,
they too were seized with a panic.  No one was willing to be
the hindmost in decamping; all, high and low, ran pell-mell
like startled deer; no authority, not even that of the king,
was longer heeded; and the king himself was carried away amidst
the wild tumult.  Lucullus, perceiving the confusion, made his attack,
and the Pontic troops allowed themselves to be massacred almost
without offering resistance.  Had the legions been able to maintain
discipline and to restrain their eagerness for spoil, hardly a man
would have escaped them, and the king himself would doubtless have
been taken.  With difficulty Mithradates escaped along with a few
attendants through the mountains to Comana (not far from Tocat
and the source of the Iris); from which, however, a Roman corps
under Marcus Pompeius soon scared him off and pursued him, till,
attended by not more than 2000 cavalry, he crossed the frontier
of his kingdom at Talaura in Lesser Armenia.  In the empire
of the great-king he found a refuge, but nothing more (end of 682).
Tigranes, it is true, ordered royal honours to be shown to his fugitive
father-in-law; but he did not even invite him to his court,
and detained him in the remote border-province to which he had come
in a sort of decorous captivity.

Pontus Becomes Roman
Sieges of the Pontic Cities

The Roman troops overran all Pontus and Lesser Armenia, and as
far as Trapezus the flat country submitted without resistance
to the conqueror.  The commanders of the royal treasure-houses also
surrendered after more or less delay, and delivered up their stores
of money.  The king ordered that the women of the royal harem--his
sisters, his numerous wives and concubines--as it was not possible
to secure their flight, should all be put to death by one of his
eunuchs at Pharnacea (Kerasunt).  The towns alone offered
obstinate resistance.  It is true that the few in the interior--
Cabira, Amasia, Eupatoria--were soon in the power of the Romans;
but the larger maritime towns, Amisus and Sinope in Pontus,
Amastris in Paphlagonia, Tius and the Pontic Heraclea in Bithynia,
defended themselves with desperation, partly animated by attachment
to the king and to their free Hellenic constitution which he had
protected, partly overawed by the bands of corsairs whom the king
had called to his aid.  Sinope and Heraclea even sent forth vessels
against the Romans; and the squadron of Sinope seized a Roman
flotilla which was bringing corn from the Tauric peninsula
for the army of Lucullus.  Heraclea did not succumb till after
a two years' siege, when the Roman fleet had cut off the city
from intercourse with the Greek towns on the Tauric peninsula and treason
had broken out in the ranks of the garrison.  When Amisus was reduced
to extremities, the garrison set fire to the town, and under cover
of the flames took to their ships.  In Sinope, where the daring
pirate-captain Seleucus and the royal eunuch Bacchides conducted
the defence, the garrison plundered the houses before it withdrew,
and set on fire the ships which it could not take along with it;
it is said that, although the greater portion of the defenders
were enabled to embark, 8000 corsairs were there put to death
by Lucullus.  These sieges of towns lasted for two whole years
and more after the battle of Cabira (682-684); Lucullus prosecuted
them in great part by means of his lieutenants, while he himself
regulated the affairs of the province of Asia, which demanded
and obtained a thorough reform.

Remarkable, in an historical point of view, as was that obstinate
resistance of the Pontic mercantile towns to the victorious Romans,
it was of little immediate use; the cause of Mithradates was none
the less lost.  The great-king had evidently, for the present
at least, no intention at all of restoring him to his kingdom.
The Roman emigrants in Asia had lost their best men by the destruction
of the Aegean fleet; of the survivors not a few, such as the active
leaders Lucius Magius and Lucius Fannius, had made their peace
with Lucullus; and with the death of Sertorius, who perished in the year
of the battle of Cabira, the last hope of the emigrants vanished.
Mithradates' own power was totally shattered, and one after another
his remaining supports gave way; his squadrons returning from Crete
and Spain, to the number of seventy sail, were attacked and destroyed
by Triarius at the island of Tenedos; even the governor
of the Bosporan kingdom, the king's own son Machares, deserted him,
and as independent prince of the Tauric Chersonese concluded
on his own behalf peace and friendship with the Romans (684).
The king himself, after a not too glorious resistance, was confined
in a remote Armenian mountain-stronghold, a fugitive from his kingdom
and almost a prisoner of his son-in-law.  Although the bands
of corsairs might still hold out in Crete, and such as had escaped
from Amisus and Sinope might make their way along the hardly-
accessible east coast of the Black Sea to the Sanigae and Lazi,
the skilful conduct of the war by Lucullus and his judicious
moderation, which did not disdain to remedy the just grievances
of the provincials and to employ the repentant emigrants as officers
in his army, had at a moderate sacrifice delivered Asia Minor
from the enemy and annihilated the Pontic kingdom, so that it might
be converted from a Roman client-state into a Roman province.
A commission of the senate was expected, to settle in concert
with the commander-in-chief the new provincial organization.

Beginning of the Armenian War

But the relations with Armenia were not yet settled.
Thata declaration of war by the Romans against Tigranes
was in itself justified and even demanded, we have already shown.
Lucullus, who looked at the state of affairs from a nearer point of view
and with a higher spirit than the senatorial college in Rome, perceived
clearly the necessity of confining Armenia to the other side
of the Tigris and of re-establishing the lost dominion of Rome over
the Mediterranean.  He showed himself in the conduct of Asiatic
affairs no unworthy successor of his instructor and friend Sulla.
A Philhellene above most Romans of his time, he was not insensible
to the obligation which Rome had come under when taking up
the heritage of Alexander--the obligation to be the shield and sword
of the Greeks in the east.  Personal motives--the wish to earn laurels
also beyond the Euphrates, irritation at the fact that the great-
king in a letter to him had omitted the title of Imperator--may
doubtless have partly influenced Lucullus; but it is unjust
to assume paltry and selfish motives for actions, which motives
of duty quite suffice to explain.  The Roman governing college
at any rate--timid, indolent, ill informed, and above all beset
by perpetual financial embarrassments--could never be expected,
without direct compulsion, to take the initiative in an expedition
so vast and costly.  About the year 682 the legitimate representatives
of the Seleucid dynasty, Antiochus called the Asiatic and his brother,
moved by the favourable turn of the Pontic war, had gone to Rome
to procure a Roman intervention in Syria, and at the same
time a recognition of their hereditary claims on Egypt.
If the latter demand might not be granted, there could not, at any rate,
be found a more favourable moment or occasion for beginning the war
which had long been necessary against Tigranes.  But the senate,
while it recognized the princes doubtless as the legitimate
kings of Syria, could not make up its mind to decree the armed
intervention.  If the favourable opportunity was to be employed,
and Armenia was to be dealt with in earnest, Lucullus had to begin
the war, without any proper orders from the senate, at his own hand
and his own risk; he found himself, just like Sulla, placed under
the necessity of executing what he did in the most manifest
interest of the existing government, not with its sanction,
but in spite of it.  His resolution was facilitated by the relations
of Rome towards Armenia, for long wavering in uncertainty between
peace and war, which screened in some measure the arbitrariness
of his proceedings, and failed not to suggest formal grounds for war.
The state of matters in Cappadocia and Syria afforded pretexts
enough; and already in the pursuit of the king of Pontus Roman
troops had violated the territory of the great-king.  As, however,
the commission of Lucullus related to the conduct of the war
against Mithradates and he wished to connect what he did
with that commission, he preferred to send one of his officers,
Appius Claudius, to the great-king at Antioch to demand the surrender
of Mithradates, which in fact could not but lead to war.

Difficulties to Be Encountered

The resolution was a grave one, especially considering
the condition of the Roman army.  It was indispensable during
the campaign in Armenia to keep the extensive territory of Pontus
strongly occupied, for otherwise the army stationed in Armenia
might lose its communications with home; and besides it might be
easily foreseen that Mithradates would attempt an inroad into his
former kingdom.  The army, at the head of which Lucullus had ended
the Mithradatic war, amounting to about 30,000 men, was obviously
inadequate for this double task.  Under ordinary circumstances
the general would have asked and obtained from his government
the despatch of a second army; but as Lucullus wished,
and was in some measure compelled, to take up the war over the head
of the government, he found himself necessitated to renounce
that plan and--although he himself incorporated the captured Thracian
mercenaries of the Pontic king with his troops--to carry the war
over the Euphrates with not more than two legions, or at most
15,000 men.  This was in itself hazardous; but the smallness
of the number might be in some degree compensated by the tried valour
of the army consisting throughout of veterans.  A far worse feature
was the temper of the soldiers, to which Lucullus, in his high
aristocratic fashion, had given far too little heed.  Lucullus
was an able general, and--according to the aristocratic standard--
an upright and kindly-disposed man, but very far from being
a favourite with his soldiers.  He was unpopular, as a decided
adherent of the oligarchy; unpopular, because he had vigorously
checked the monstrous usury of the Roman capitalists in Asia Minor;
unpopular, on account of the toils and fatigues which he inflicted
on his troops; unpopular, because he demanded strict discipline
in his soldiers and prevented as far as possible the pillage
of the Greek towns by his men, but withal caused many a waggon
and many a camel to be laden with the treasures of the east for himself;
unpopular too on account of his manner, which was polished,
haughty, Hellenizing, not at all familiar, and inclining, wherever
it was possible, to ease and pleasure.  There was no trace in him
of the charm which weaves a personal bond between the general
and the soldier.  Moreover, a large portion of his ablest soldiers
had every reason to complain of the unmeasured prolongation of their
term of service.  His two best legions were the same which Flaccus
and Fimbria had led in 668 to the east;(14) notwithstanding
that shortly after the battle of Cabira they had been promised their
discharge well earned by thirteen campaigns, Lucullus now led them
beyond the Euphrates to face a new incalculable war--it seemed
as though the victors of Cabira were to be treated worse than
the vanquished of Cannae.(15)  It was in fact more than rash that,
with troops so weak and so much out of humour, a general should at his
own hand and, strictly speaking, at variance with the constitution,
undertake an expedition to a distant and unknown land, full of rapid
streams and snow-clad mountains--a land which from the very vastness
of its extent rendered any lightly-undertaken attack fraught
with danger.  The conduct of Lucullus was therefore much
and not unreasonably censured in Rome; only, amidst the censure
the fact should not have been concealed, that the perversity
of the government was the prime occasion of this venturesome
project of the general, and, if it did not justify it, rendered
it at least excusable.

Lucullus Crosses the Euphrates

The mission of Appius Claudius was designed not only to furnish
a diplomatic pretext for the war, but also to induce the princes
and cities of Syria especially to take arms against the great-king:
in the spring of 685 the formal attack began.  During the winter
the king of Cappadocia had silently provided vessels for transport;
with these the Euphrates was crossed at Melitene, and the further
march was directed by way of the Taurus-passes to the Tigris.
This too Lucullus crossed in the region of Amida (Diarbekr),
and advanced towards the road which connected the second capital
Tigranocerta,(16) recently founded on the south frontier of Armenia,
with the old metropolis Artaxata.  At the former was stationed
the great-king, who had shortly before returned from Syria,
after having temporarily deferred the prosecution of his plans
of conquest on the Mediterranean on account of the embroilment
with the Romans.  He was just projecting an inroad into Roman Asia
from Cilicia and Lycaonia, and was considering whether the Romans
would at once evacuate Asia or would previously give him battle,
possibly at Ephesus, when the news was brought to him of the advance
of Lucullus, which threatened to cut off his communications
with Artaxata.  He ordered the messenger to be hanged,
but the disagreeable reality remained unaltered; so he left
the new capital and resorted to the interior of Armenia, in order
there to raise a force--which had not yet been done--against the Romans.
Meanwhile Mithrobarzanes with the troops actually at his disposal
and in concert with the neighbouring Bedouin tribes, who were called out
in all haste, was to give employment to the Romans.  But the corps
of Mithrobarzanes was dispersed by the Roman vanguard, and the Arabs
by a detachment under Sextilius; Lucullus gained the road leading
from Tigranocerta to Artaxata, and, while on the right bank
of the Tigrisa Roman detachment pursued the great-king
retreating northwards, Lucullus himself crossed to the left
and marched forward to Tigranocerta.

Siege and Battle of Tigranocerta

The exhaustless showers of arrows which the garrison poured upon
the Roman army, and the setting fire to the besieging machines
by means of naphtha, initiated the Romans into the new dangers
of Iranian warfare; and the brave commandant Mancaeus maintained
the city, till at length the great royal army of relief had assembled
from all parts of the vast empire and the adjoining countries
that were open to Armenian recruiting officers, and had advanced
through the north-eastern passes to the relief of the capital.
The leader Taxiles, experienced in the wars of Mithradates,
advised Tigranes to avoid a battle, and to surround and starve out
the small Roman army by means of his cavalry.  But when the king saw
the Roman general, who had determined to give battle without raising
the siege, move out with not much more than 10,000 men against a force
twenty times superior, and boldly cross the river which separated
the two armies; when he surveyed on the one side this little band,
"too many for an embassy, too few for an army," and on the other
side his own immense host, in which the peoples from the Black Sea
and the Caspian met with those of the Mediterranean and of
the Persian Gulf, in which the dreaded iron-clad lancers alone
were more numerous than the whole army of Lucullus, and in which
even infantry armed after the Roman fashion were not wanting;
he resolved promptly to accept the battle desired by the enemy.
But while the Armenians were still forming their array, the quick
eye of Lucullus perceived that they had neglected to occupy a height
which commanded the whole position of their cavalry.  He hastened
to occupy it with two cohorts, while at the same time his weak
cavalry by a flank attack diverted the attention of the enemy
from this movement; and as soon as he had reached the height, he led
his little band against the rear of the enemy's cavalry.  They were
totally broken and threw themselves on the not yet fully formed
infantry, which fled without even striking a blow.  The bulletin
of the victor--that 100,000 Armenians and five Romans had fallen
and that the king, throwing away his turban and diadem, had galloped
off unrecognized with a few horsemen--is composed in the style
of his master Sulla.  Nevertheless the victory achieved on the 6th
October 685 before Tigranocerta remains one of the most brilliant
stars in the glorious history of Roman warfare; and it was not less
momentous than brilliant.

All the Armenian Conquests Pass into the Hands of the Romans

All the provinces wrested from the Parthians or Syrians
to the south of the Tigris were by this means strategically lost
to the Armenians, and passed, for the most part, without delay
into the possession of the victor.  The newly-built second capital
itselfset the example.  The Greeks, who had been forced in large numbers
to settle there, rose against the garrison and opened to the Roman
army the gates of the city, which was abandoned to the pillage
of the soldiers.  It had been created for the new great-kingdom,
and, like this, was effaced by the victor.  From Cilicia and Syria
all the troops had already been withdrawn by the Armenian satrap
Magadates to reinforce the relieving army before Tigranocerta.
Lucullus advanced into Commagene, the most northern province
of Syria, and stormed Samosata, the capital; he did not reach Syria
proper, but envoys arrived from the dynasts and communities as far
as the Red Sea--from Hellenes, Syrians, Jews, Arabs--to do homage
to the Romans as their sovereigns.  Even the prince of Corduene,
the province situated to the east of Tigranocerta, submitted;
while, on the other hand, Guras the brother of the great-king
maintained himself in Nisibis, and thereby in Mesopotamia.
Lucullus came forward throughout as the protector of the Hellenic
princes and municipalities: in Commagene he placed Antiochus,
a prince of the Seleucid house, on the throne; he recognized
Antiochus Asiaticus, who after the withdrawal of the Armenians had
returned to Antioch, as king of Syria; he sent the forced settlers
of Tigranocerta once more away to their homes.  The immense stores
and treasures of the great-king--the grain amounted to 30,000,000
-medimni-, the money in Tigranocerta alone to 8000 talents (nearly
2,000,000 pounds)--enabled Lucullus to defray the expenses of the war
without making any demand on the state-treasury, and to bestow
on each of his soldiers, besides the amplest maintenance, a present
of 800 -denarii- (33 pounds).

Tigranes and Mithradates

The great-king was deeply humbled.  He was of a feeble character,
arrogant in prosperity, faint-hearted in adversity.  Probably
an agreement would have been come to between him and Lucullus--
an agreement which there was every reason that the great-king should
purchase by considerable sacrifices, and the Roman general should
grant under tolerable conditions--had not the old Mithradates been
in existence.  The latter had taken no part in the conflicts around
Tigranocerta.  Liberated after twenty months' captivity about
the middle of 684 in consequence of the variance that had occurred
between the great-king and the Romans, he had been despatched
with 10,000 Armenian cavalry to his former kingdom, to threaten
the communications of the enemy.  Recalled even before he could
accomplish anything there, when the great-king summoned his whole
force to relieve the capital which he had built, Mithradates was met
on his arrival before Tigranocerta by the multitudes just fleeing
from the field of battle.  To every one, from the great-king
down to the common soldier, all seemed lost.  But if Tigranes
should now make peace, not only would Mithradates lose the last
chance of being reinstated in his kingdom, but his surrender would
be beyond doubt the first condition of peace; and certainly
Tigranes would not have acted otherwise towards him than Bocchus
had formerly acted towards Jugurtha.  The king accordingly staked
his whole personal weight to prevent things from taking this turn,
and to induce the Armenian court to continue the war, in which
he had nothing to lose and everything to gain; and, fugitive
and dethroned as was Mithradates, his influence at this court
was not slight.  He was still a stately and powerful man, who,
although already upwards of sixty years old, vaulted on horseback
in full armour, and in hand-to-hand conflict stood his ground
like the best.  Years and vicissitudes seemed to have steeled his spirit:
while in earlier times he sent forth generals to lead his armies
and took no direct part in war himself, we find him henceforth
as an old man commanding in person and fighting in person on the field
of battle.  To one who, during his fifty years of rule, had witnessed
so many unexampled changes of fortune, the cause of the great-king
appeared by no means lost through the defeat of Tigranocerta;
whereas the position of Lucullus was very difficult, and, if peace
should not now take place and the war should be judiciously continued,
even in a high degree precarious.

Renewal of the War

The veteran of varied experience, who stood towards the great-king
almost as a father, and was now able to exercise a personal
influence over him, overpowered by his energy that weak man,
and induced him not only to resolve on the continuance of the war,
but also to entrust Mithradates with its political and military
management.  The war was now to be changed from a cabinet contest
into a national Asiatic struggle; the kings and peoples of Asia
were to unite for this purpose against the domineering and haughty
Occidentals.  The greatest exertions were made to reconcile
the Parthians and Armenians with each other, and to induce them
to make common cause against Rome.  At the suggestion of Mithradates,
Tigranes offered to give back to the Arsacid Phraates the God (who
had reigned since 684) the provinces conquered by the Armenians--
Mesopotamia, Adiabene, the "great valleys"--and to enter into friendship
and alliance with him.  But, after all that had previously taken place,
this offer could scarcely reckon on a favourable reception;
Phraates preferred to secure the boundary of the Euphrates
by a treaty not with the Armenians, but with the Romans,
and to look on, while the hated neighbour and the inconvenient
foreigner fought out their strife.  Greater success attended
the application of Mithradates to the peoples of the east
than to the kings.  It was not difficult to represent the war
as a national one of the east against the west, for such it was;
it might very well be made a religious war also, and the report
might be spread that the object aimed at by the army of Lucullus
was the temple of the Persian Nanaea or Anaitis in Elymais or the modern
Luristan, the most celebrated and the richest shrine in the whole
region of the Euphrates.(17) From far and near the Asiatics flocked
in crowds to the banner of the kings, who summoned them to protect
the east and its gods from the impious foreigners.  But facts had
shown not only that the mere assemblage of enormous hosts
was of little avail, but that the troops really capable of marching
and fighting were by their very incorporation in such a mass rendered
useless and involved in the general ruin.  Mithradates sought
above all to develop the arm which was at once weakest among
the Occidentals and strongest among the Asiatics, the cavalry;
in the army newly formed by him half of the force was mounted.
For the ranks of the infantry he carefully selected, out of the mass
of recruits called forth or volunteering, those fit for service,
and caused them to be drilled by his Pontic officers.  The considerable
army, however, which soon assembled under the banner of the great-
king was destined not to measure its strength with the Roman
veterans on the first chance field of battle, but to confine itself
to defence and petty warfare.  Mithradates had conducted
the last war in his empire on the system of constantly retreating
and avoiding battle; similar tactics were adopted on this occasion,
and Armenia proper was destined as the theatre of war--the hereditary
land of Tigranes, still wholly untouched by the enemy, and excellently
adapted for this sort of warfare both by its physical character
and by the patriotism of its inhabitants.

Dissatisfaction with Lucullus in the Capital and in the Army

The year 686 found Lucullus in a position of difficulty,
which daily assumed a more dangerous aspect.  In spite of his brilliant
victories, people in Rome were not at all satisfied with him.
The senate felt the arbitrary nature of his conduct: the capitalist
party, sorely offended by him, set all means of intrigue
and corruption at work to effect his recall.  Daily the Forum
echoed with just and unjust complaints regarding the foolhardy,
the covetous, the un-Roman, the traitorous general.  The senate
so far yielded to the complaints regarding the union of such unlimited
power--two ordinary governorships and an important extraordinary
command--in the hands of such a man, as to assign the province
of Asia to one of the praetors, and the province of Cilicia
along with three newly-raised legions to the consul Quintus
Marcius Rex, and to restrict the general to the command
against Mithradates and Tigranes.

These accusations springing up against the general in Rome
found a dangerous echo in the soldiers' quarters on the Iris
andon the Tigris; and the more so that several officers including
the general's own brother-in-law, Publius Clodius, worked upon
the soldiers with this view.  The report beyond doubt designedly
circulated by these, that Lucullus now thought of combining
with the Pontic-Armenian war an expedition against the Parthians,
fed the exasperation of the troops.

Lucullus Advances into Armenia

But while the troublesome temper of the government and of the soldier
thus threatened the victorious general with recall and mutiny,
he himself continued like a desperate gambler to increase
his stake and his risk.  He did not indeed march against the Parthians
but when Tigranes showed himself neither ready to make peace
nor disposed, as Lucullus wished, to risk a second pitched
battle, Lucullus resolved to advance from Tigranocerta, through
the difficult mountain-country along the eastern shore of the lake
of Van, into the valley of the eastern Euphrates (or the Arsanias,
now Myrad-Chai), and thence into that of the Araxes, where,
on the northern slope of Ararat, lay Artaxata the capital of Armenia
proper, with the hereditary castle and the harem of the king.
He hoped, by threatening the king's hereditary residence,
to compel him to fight either on the way or at any rate before
Artaxata.  It was inevitably necessary to leave behind a division
at Tigranocerta; and, as the marching army could not possibly be
further reduced, no course was left but to weaken the position
in Pontus and to summon troops thence to Tigranocerta.  The main
difficulty, however, was the shortness of the Armenian summer,
so inconvenient for military enterprises.  On the tableland
of Armenia, which lies 5000 feet and more above the level of the sea,
the corn at Erzeroum only germinates in the beginning of June,
and the winter sets in with the harvest in September; Artaxata
had to be reached and the campaign had to be ended in four
months at the utmost.

At midsummer, 686, Lucullus set out from Tigranocerta,
and, marching doubtless through the pass of Bitlis and farther
to the westward along the lake of Van--arrived on the plateau of Musch
and at the Euphrates.  The march went on--amidst constant
and very troublesome skirmishing with the enemy's cavalry,
and especially with the mounted archers--slowly, but without material
hindrance; and the passage of the Euphrates, which was seriously
defended by the Armenian cavalry, was secured by a successful engagement;
the Armenian infantry showed itself, but the attempt to involve it
in the conflict did not succeed.  Thus the army reached the tableland,
properly so called, of Armenia, and continued its march
into the unknown country.  They had suffered no actual misfortune;
but the mere inevitable delaying of the march by the difficulties
of the ground and the horsemen of the enemy was itself a very serious
disadvantage.  Long before they had reached Artaxata, winter set
in; and when the Italian soldiers saw snow and ice around them,
the bow of military discipline that had been far too tightly
stretched gave way.

Lucullus Retreats to Mesopotamia
Capture of Nisibus

A formal mutiny compelled the general to order a retreat,
which he effected with his usual skill.  When he had safely reached
Mesopotamia where the season still permitted farther operations,
Lucullus crossed the Tigris, and threw himself with the mass of his
army on Nisibis, the last city that here remained to the Armenians.
The great-king, rendered wiser by the experience acquired before
Tigranocerta, left the city to itself: notwithstanding its brave
defence it was stormed in a dark, rainy night by the besiegers,
and the army of Lucullus found there booty not less rich and winter-
quarters not less comfortable than the year before in Tigranocerta.

Conflicts in Pontus and at Tigranocerta

But, meanwhile, the whole weight of the enemy's offensive fell
on the weak Roman divisions left behind in Pontus and in Armenia.
Tigranes compelled the Roman commander of the latter corps, Lucius
Fannius--the same who had formerly been the medium of communication
between Sertorius and Mithradates (18)--to throw himself
into a fortress, and kept him beleaguered there.  Mithradates
advanced into Pontus with 4000 Armenian horsemen and 4000 of his own,
and as liberator and avenger summoned the nation to rise against
the common foe.  All joined him; the scattered Roman soldiers
were everywhere seized and put to death: when Hadrianus, the Roman
commandant in Pontus,(19) led his troops against him, the former
mercenaries of the king and the numerous natives of Pontus
following the army as slaves made common cause with the enemy.
For two successive days the unequal conflict lasted; it was only
the circumstance that the king after receiving two wounds had
to be carried off from the field of battle, which gave the Roman
commander the opportunity of breaking off the virtually lost
battle, and throwing himself with the small remnant of his troops
into Cabira.  Another of Lucullus' lieutenants who accidentally
came into this region, the resolute Triarius, again gathered round
him a body of troops and fought a successful engagement
with the king; but he was much too weak to expel him afresh
from Pontic soil, and had to acquiesce while the king took up
winter-quarters in Comana.

Farther Retreat to Pontus

So the spring of 687 came on.  The reunion of the army in Nisibis,
the idleness of winter-quarters, the frequent absence of the general,
had meanwhile increased the insubordination of the troops;
not only did they vehemently demand to be led back, but it was already
tolerably evident that, if the general refused to lead them home,
they would break up of themselves.  The supplies were scanty;
Fannius and Triarius, in their distress, sent the most urgent
entreaties to the general to furnish aid.  With a heavy heart
Lucullus resolved to yield to necessity, to give up Nisibis
and Tigranocerta, and, renouncing all the brilliant hopes of his
Armenian expedition, to return to the right bank of the Euphrates.
Fannius was relieved; but in Pontus the help was too late.
Triarius, not strong enough to fight with Mithradates, had taken
up a strong position at Gaziura (Turksal on the Iris, to the west
of Tokat), while the baggage was left behind at Dadasa.
But when Mithradates laid siege to the latter place, the Roman soldiers,
apprehensive for their property, compelled their leader to leave
his secure position, and to give battle to the king between Gaziura
and Ziela (Zilleh) on the Scotian heights.

Defeat of the Romans in Pontus at Ziela

What Triarius had foreseen, occurred.  In spite of the stoutest
resistance the wing which the king commanded in person broke
the Roman line and huddled the infantry together into a clayey ravine,
where it could make neither a forward nor a lateral movement
and was cut to pieces without pity.  The king indeed was dangerously
wounded by a Roman centurion, who sacrificed his life for it;
but the defeat was not the less complete.  The Roman camp was taken;
the flower of the infantry, and almost all the staff and subaltern
officers, strewed the ground; the dead were left lying unburied
on the field of battle, and, when Lucullus arrived on the right bank
of the Euphrates, he learned the defeat not from his own soldiers,
but through the reports of the natives.

Mutiny of the Soldiers

Along with this defeat came the outbreak of the military conspiracy.
At this very time news arrived from Rome that the people had resolved
to grant a discharge to the soldiers whose legal term of service had
expired, to wit, to the Fimbrians, and to entrust the chief command
in Pontus and Bithynia to one of the consuls of the current year:
the successor of Lucullus, the consul Manius Acilius Glabrio,
had already landed in Asia Minor.  The disbanding of the bravest
and most turbulent legions and the recall of the commander-in-chief,
in connection with the impression produced by the defeat of Ziela,
dissolved all the bonds of authority in the army just when the general
had most urgent need of their aid.  Near Talaura in Lesser Armenia
he confronted the Pontic troops, at whose head Tigranes' son-in-law,
Mithradates of Media, had already engaged the Romans successfully
in a cavalry conflict; the main force of the great-king was advancing
to the same point from Armenia.  Lucullus sent to Quintus Marcius
the new governor of Cilicia, who had just arrived on the way
to his province with three legions in Lycaonia, to obtain help from him;
Marcius declared that his soldiers refused to march to Armenia.
He sent to Glabrio with the request that he would take up the supreme
command committed to him by the people; Glabrio showed still less
inclination to undertake this task, which had now become so difficult
and hazardous.  Lucullus, compelled to retain the command,
with the view of not being obliged to fight at Talaura against
the Armenian and the Pontic armies conjoined, ordered a movement
against the advancing Armenians.

Farther Retreat to Asia Minor

The soldiers obeyed the order to march; but, when they reached
the point where the routes to Armenia and Cappadocia diverged,
the bulk of the army took the latter, and proceeded to the province
of Asia.  There the Fimbrians demanded their immediate discharge;
and although they desisted from this at the urgent entreaty
of the commander-in-chief and the other corps, they yet persevered
in their purpose of disbanding if the winter should come on without
an enemy confronting them; which accordingly was the case.
Mithradates not only occupied once more almost his whole kingdom,
but his cavalry ranged over all Cappadocia and as far as Bithynia;
king Ariobarzanes sought help equally in vain from Quintus Marcius,
from Lucullus, and from Glabrio.  It was a strange, almost
incredible issue for a war conducted in a manner so glorious.
If we look merely to military achievements, hardly any other Roman
general accomplished so much with so trifling means as Lucullus;
the talent and the fortune of Sulla seemed to have devolved on this
his disciple.  That under the circumstances the Roman army should
have returned from Armenia to Asia Minor uninjured, is a military
miracle which, so far as we can judge, far excels the retreat
of Xenophon; and, although mainly doubtless to be explained
by the solidity of the Roman, and the inefficiency of the Oriental,
system of war, it at all events secures to the leader of this expedition
an honourable name in the foremost rank of men of military
capacity.  If the name of Lucullus is not usually included among these,
it is to all appearance simply owing to the fact that no narrative
of his campaigns which is in a military point of view even tolerable
has come down to us, and to the circumstance that in everything
and particularly in war, nothing is taken into account
but the final result; and this, in reality, was equivalent
to a complete defeat.  Through the last unfortunate turn of things,
and principally through the mutiny of the soldiers, all the results
of an eight years' war had been lost; in the winter of 687-688
the Romans again stood exactly at the same spot
as in the winter of 679-680.

War with the Pirates

The maritime war against the pirates, which began at the same time
with the continental war and was all along most closely connected
with it, yielded no better results.  It has been already mentioned
(20) that the senate in 680 adopted the judicious resolution
to entrust the task of clearing the seas from the corsairs
to a single admiral in supreme command, the praetor Marcus Antonius.
But at the very outset they had made an utter mistake in the choice
of the leader; or rather those, who had carried this measure
so appropriate in itself, had not taken into account that in the senate
all personal questions were decided by the influence of Cethegus(21)
and similar coterie-considerations.  They had moreover
neglected to furnish the admiral of their choice with money
and ships in a manner befitting his comprehensive task,
so that with his enormous requisitions he was almost as burdensome
to the provincials whom he befriended as were the corsairs.

Defeat of Antonius off Cydonia

The results were corresponding.  In the Campanian waters the fleet
of Antonius captured a number of piratical vessels.  But an engagement
took place with the Cretans, who had entered into friendship
and alliance with the pirates and abruptly rejected his demand
that they should desist from such fellowship; and the chains,
with which the foresight of Antonius had provided his vessels
for the purpose of placing the captive buccaneers in irons,
served to fasten the quaestor and the other Roman prisoners
to the masts of the captured Roman ships, when the Cretan generals
Lasthenes and Panares steered back in triumph to Cydonia
from the naval combat in which they had engaged the Romans
off their island.  Antonius, after having squandered immense sums
and accomplished not the slightest result by his inconsiderate mode
of warfare, died in 683 at Crete.  The ill success of his expedition,
the costliness of building a fleet, and the repugnance of the oligarchy
to confer any powers of a more comprehensive kind on the magistrates,
led them, after the practical termination of this enterprise
by Antonius' death, to make no farther nomination of an admiral-in-chief,
and to revert to the old system of leaving each governor to look
after the suppression of piracy in his own province: the fleet equipped
by Lucullus for instance(22) was actively employed for this purpose
in the Aegean sea.

Cretan War

So far however as the Cretans were concerned, a disgrace
like that endured off Cydonia seemed even to the degenerate Romans
of this age as if it could be answered only by a declaration of war.
Yet the Cretan envoys, who in the year 684 appeared in Rome
with the request that the prisoners might be taken back and the old
alliance reestablished, had almost obtained a favourable decree
of the senate; what the whole corporation termed a disgrace,
the individual senator was ready to sell for a substantial price.
It was not till a formal resolution of the senate rendered the loans
of the Cretan envoys among the Roman bankers non-actionable--
that is, not until the senate had incapacitated itself for undergoing
bribery--that a decree passed to the effect that the Cretan
communities, if they wished to avoid war, should hand over not only
the Roman deserters but the authors of the outrage perpetrated off
Cydonia--the leaders Lasthenes and Panares--to the Romans
for befitting punishment, should deliver up all ships and boats of four
or more oars, should furnish 400 hostages, and should pay a fine
of 4000 talents (975,000 pounds).  When the envoys declared that they
were not empowered to enter into such terms, one of the consuls
of the next year was appointed to depart on the expiry of his official
term for Crete, in order either to receive there what was demanded
or to begin the war.

Metellus Subdues Crete

Accordingly in 685 the proconsul Quintus Metellus appeared
in the Cretan waters.  The communities of the island, with the larger
towns Gortyna, Cnossus, Cydonia at their head, were resolved rather
to defend themselves in arms than to submit to those excessive
demands.  The Cretans were a nefarious and degenerate people,(23)
with whose public and private existence piracy was as intimately
associated as robbery with the commonwealth of the Aetolians;
but they resembled the Aetolians in valour as in many other respects,
and accordingly these two were the only Greek communities
that waged a courageous and honourable struggle for independence.
At Cydonia, where Metellus landed his three legions, a Cretan army
of 24,000 men under Lasthenes and Panares was ready to receive him;
a battle took place in the open field, in which the victory
after a hard struggle remained with the Romans.  Nevertheless
the towns bade defiance from behind their walls to the Roman general;
Metellus had to make up his mind to besiege them in succession.
First Cydonia, in which the remains of the beaten army had taken
refuge, was after a long siege surrendered by Panares in return
for the promise of a free departure for himself.  Lasthenes, who had
escaped from the town, had to be besieged a second time in Cnossus;
and, when this fortress also was on the point of falling,
he destroyed its treasures and escaped once more to places which still
continued their defence, such as Lyctus, Eleuthera, and others.
Two years (686, 687) elapsed, before Metellus became master
of the whole island and the last spot of free Greek soil thereby
passed under the control of the dominant Romans; the Cretan communities,
as they were the first of all Greek commonwealths to develop
the free urban constitution and the dominion of the sea, were also
to be the last of all those Greek maritime states that formerly filled
the Mediterranean to succumb to the Roman continental power.

The Pirates in the Mediterranean

All the legal conditions were fulfilled for celebrating another
of the usual pompous triumphs; the gens of the Metelli could add
to its Macedonian, Numidian, Dalmatian, Balearic titles with equal
right the new title of Creticus, and Rome possessed another name
of pride.  Nevertheless the power of the Romans in the Mediterranean
was never lower, that of the corsairs never higher, than in those
years.  Well might the Cilicians and Cretans of the seas, who are
said to have numbered at this time 1000 ships, mock the Isauricus
and the Creticus, and their empty victories.  With what effect
the pirates interfered in the Mithradatic war, and how the obstinate
resistance of the Pontic maritime towns derived its best resources
from the corsair-state, has been already related.  But that state
transacted business on a hardly less grand scale on its own behoof.
Almost under the eyes of the fleet of Lucullus, the pirate Athenodorus
surprised in 685 the island of Delos, destroyed its far-famed
shrines and temples, and carried off the whole population
into slavery.  The island Lipara near Sicily paid to the pirates
a fixed tribute annually, to remain exempt from like attacks.
Another pirate chief Heracleon destroyed in 682 the squadron
equipped in Sicily against him, and ventured with no more than four
open boats to sail into the harbour of Syracuse.  Two years later
his colleague Pyrganion even landed at the same port, established
himself there and sent forth flying parties into the island,
till the Roman governor at last compelled him to re-embark.
People grew at length quite accustomed to the fact that all
the provinces equipped squadrons and raised coastguards,
or were at any rate taxed for both; and yet the pirates appeared
to plunder the provinces with as much regularity as the Roman governors.
But even the sacred soil of Italy was now no longer respected
by the shameless transgressors: from Croton they carried off with them
the temple-treasures of the Lacinian Hera; they landed in Brundisium,
Misenum, Caieta, in the Etruscan ports, even in Ostia itself; they
seized the most eminent Roman officers as captives, among others
the admiral of the Cilician army and two praetors with their whole
retinue, with the dreaded -fasces- themselves and all the insignia
of their dignity; they carried away from a villa at Misenum
the very sister of the Roman admiral-in-chief Antonius, who was sent
forth to annihilate the pirates; they destroyed in the port
of Ostia the Roman war fleet equipped against them and commanded
by a consul.  The Latin husbandman, the traveller on the Appian highway,
the genteel bathing visitor at the terrestrial paradise of Baiae
were no longer secure of their property or their life for a single
moment; all traffic and all intercourse were suspended;
the most dreadful scarcity prevailed in Italy, and especially
in the capital, which subsisted on transmarine corn.  The contemporary
world and history indulge freely in complaints of insupportable
distress; in this case the epithet may have been appropriate.

Servile Disturbances

We have already described how the senate restored by Sulla carried
out its guardianship of the frontier in Macedonia, its discipline
over the client kings of Asia Minor, and lastly its marine police;
the results were nowhere satisfactory.  Nor did better success
attend the government in another and perhaps even more urgent
matter, the supervision of the provincial, and above all
of the Italian, proletariate.  The gangrene of a slave-proletariate
Gnawed at the vitals of all the states of antiquity, and the more so,
the more vigorously they had risen and prospered; for the power
and riches of the state regularly led, under the existing
circumstances, to a disproportionate increase of the body
of slaves.  Rome naturally suffered more severely from this cause
than any other state of antiquity.  Even the government of the sixth
century had been under the necessity of sending troops against
the gangs of runaway herdsmen and rural slaves.  The plantation-system,
spreading more and more among the Italian speculators
had infinitely increased the dangerous evil: in the time of
the Gracchan and Marian crises and in close connection with them
servile revolts had taken place at numerous points of the Roman
empire, and in Sicily had even grown into two bloody wars (619-622
and 652-654;(24)).  But the ten years of the rule of the restoration
after Sulla's death formed the golden age both for the buccaneers
at sea and for bands of a similar character on land, above all
in the Italian peninsula, which had hitherto been comparatively
well regulated.  The land could hardly be said any longer to enjoy
peace.  In the capital and the less populous districts of Italy
robberies were of everyday occurrence, murders were frequent.
A special decree of the people was issued--perhaps at this epoch--
against kidnapping of foreign slaves and of free men; a special
summary action was about this time introduced against violent
deprivation of landed property.  These crimes could not
but appear specially dangerous, because, while they were usually
perpetrated by the proletariate, the upper class were to a great
extent also concerned in them as moral originators and partakers
in the gain.  The abduction of men and of estates was very frequently
suggested by the overseers of the large estates and carried out
by the gangs of slaves, frequently armed, that were collected there:
and many a man even of high respectability did not disdain what
one of his officious slave-overseers thus acquired for him
as Mephistopheles acquired for Faust the lime trees of Philemon.
The state of things is shown by the aggravated punishment for outrages
on property committed by armed bands, which was introduced
by one of the better Optimates, Marcus Lucullus, as presiding over
the administration of justice in the capital about the year 676,(25)
with the express object of inducing the proprietors of large bands
of slaves to exercise a more strict superintendence over them
and thereby avoid the penalty of seeing them judicially condemned.
Where pillage and murder were thus carried on by order
of the world of quality, it was natural for these masses of slaves
and proletarians to prosecute the same business on their own account;
a spark was sufficient to set fire to so inflammable materials,
and to convert the proletariate into an insurrectionary army.
An occasion was soon found.

Outbreak of the Gladiatorial War in Italy
Spartacus

The gladiatorial games, which now held the first rank
among the popular amusements in Italy, had led to the institution
of numerous establishments, more especially in and around Capua,
designed partly for the custody, partly for the training
of those slaves who were destined to kill or be killed for the amusement
of the sovereign multitude.  These were naturally in great part
brave men captured in war, who had not forgotten that they had once
faced the Romans in the field.  A number of these desperadoes broke out
of one of the Capuan gladiatorial schools (681), and sought refuge
on Mount Vesuvius.  At their head were two Celts, who were designated
by their slave-names Crixus and Oenomaus, and the Thracian Spartacus.
The latter, perhaps a scion of the noble family of the Spartocids
which attained even to royal honours in its Thracian home
and in Panticapaeum, had served among the Thracian auxiliaries
in the Roman army, had deserted and gone as a brigand to the mountains,
and had been there recaptured and destined for the gladiatorial games.

The Insurrection Takes Shape

The inroads of this little band, numbering at first only seventy-four
persons, but rapidly swelling by concourse from the surrounding
country, soon became so troublesome to the inhabitants
of the rich region of Campania, that these, after having vainly
attempted themselves to repel them, sought help against them
from Rome.  A division of 3000 men hurriedly collected appeared
under the leadership of Clodius Glaber, and occupied the approaches
to Vesuvius with the view of starving out the slaves.
But the brigands in spite of their small number and their
defective armament had the boldness to scramble down steep declivities
and to fall upon the Roman posts; and when the wretched militia saw
the little band of desperadoes unexpectedly assail them, they took
to their heels and fled on all sides.  This first success procured
for the robbers arms and increased accessions to their ranks.
Although even now a great portion of them carried nothing
but pointed clubs, the new and stronger division of the militia--
two legions under the praetor Publius Varinius--which advanced
from Rome into Campania, found them encamped almost like a regular army
in the plain.  Varinius had a difficult position.  His militia,
compelled to bivouac opposite the enemy, were severely weakened
by the damp autumn weather and the diseases which it engendered;
and, worse than the epidemics, cowardice and insubordination thinned
the ranks.  At the very outset one of his divisions broke up entirely,
so that the fugitives did not fall back on the main corps, but went
straight home.  Thereupon, when the order was given to advance
against the enemy's entrenchments and attack them, the greater
portion of the troops refused to comply with it.  Nevertheless
Varinius set out with those who kept their ground against
the robber-band; but it was no longer to be found where he sought it.
It had broken up in the deepest silence and had turned to the south
towards Picentia (Vicenza near Amain), where Varinius overtook it
indeed, but could not prevent it from retiring over the Silarus
into the interior of Lucania, the chosen land of shepherds and robbers.
Varinius followed thither, and there at length the despised enemy
arrayed themselves for battle.  All the circumstances
under which the combat took place were to the disadvantage
of the Romans: the soldiers, vehemently as they had demanded
battle a little before, fought ill; Varinius was completely
vanquished; his horse and the insignia of his official
dignity fell with the Roman camp itself into the enemy's hand.
The south-Italian slaves, especially the brave half-savage herdsmen,
flocked in crowds to the banner of the deliverers who had
so unexpectedly appeared; according to the most moderate estimates
the number of armed insurgents rose to 40,000 men.  Campania,
just evacuated, was speedily reoccupied, and the Roman corps which was
left behind there under Gaius Thoranius, the quaestor of Varinius,
was broken and destroyed.  In the whole south and south-west
of Italy the open country was in the hands of the victorious bandit-
chiefs; even considerable towns, such as Consentia in the Bruttian
country, Thurii and Metapontum in Lucania, Nola and Nuceria
in Campania, were stormed by them, and suffered all the atrocities
which victorious barbarians could inflict on defenceless civilized
men, and unshackled slaves on their former masters.  That a conflict
like this should be altogether abnormal and more a massacre
than a war, was unhappily a matter of course: the masters
duly crucified every captured slave; the slaves naturally killed
their prisoners also, or with still more sarcastic retaliation
even compelled their Roman captives to slaughter each other
in gladiatorial sport; as was subsequently done with three hundred
of them at the obsequies of a robber-captain who had fallen in combat.

Great Victories of Spartacus

In Rome people were with reason apprehensive as to the destructive
conflagration which was daily spreading.  It was resolved next year
(682) to send both consuls against the formidable leaders
of the gang.  The praetor Quintus Arrius, a lieutenant of the consul
Lucius Gellius, actually succeeded in seizing and destroying
at Mount Garganus in Apulia the Celtic band, which under Crixus
had separated from the mass of the robber-army and was levying
contributions at its own hand.  But Spartacus achieved
all the more brilliant victories in the Apennines and in northern Italy,
where first the consul Gnaeus Lentulus who had thought to surround
and capture the robbers, then his colleague Gellius and the so recently
victorious praetor Arrius, and lastly at Mutina the governor
of Cisalpine Gaul Gaius Cassius (consul 681) and the praetor Gnaeus
Manlius, one after another succumbed to his blows.  The scarcely-
armed gangs of slaves were the terror of the legions; the series
of defeats recalled the first years of the Hannibalic war.

Internal Dissension among the Insurgents

What might have come of it, had the national kings
from the mountains of Auvergne or of the Balkan, and not runaway
gladiatorial slaves, been at the head of the victorious bands,
it is impossible to say; as it was, the movement remained
notwithstanding its brilliant victories a rising of robbers,
and succumbed less to the superior force of its opponents than
to internal discord and the want of definite plan.  The unity
in confronting the common foe, which was so remarkably conspicuous
in the earlier servile wars of Sicily, was wanting in this Italian
war--a difference probably due to the fact that, while the Sicilian
slaves found a quasi-national point of union in the common
Syrohellenism, the Italian slaves were separated into the two
bodies of Helleno-Barbarians and Celto-Germans.  The rupture
between the Celtic Crixus and the Thracian Spartacus--Oenomaus had
fallen in one of the earliest conflicts--and other similar quarrels
crippled them in turning to account the successes achieved,
and procured for the Romans several important victories.  But the want
of a definite plan and aim produced far more injurious effects
on the enterprise than the insubordination of the Celto-Germans.
Spartacus doubtless--to judge by the little which we learn
regarding that remarkable man--stood in this respect above his party.
Along with his strategic ability he displayed no ordinary
talent for organization, as indeed from the very outset
the uprightness, with which he presided over his band and distributed
the spoil, had directed the eyes of the multitude to him quite
as much at least as his valour.  To remedy the severely felt want
of cavalry and of arms, he tried with the help of the herds of horses
seized in Lower Italy to train and discipline a cavalry, and, so soon as
he got the port of Thurii into his hands, to procure from that quarter
iron and copper, doubtless through the medium of the pirates.
But in the main matters he was unable to induce the wild hordes
whom he led to pursue any fixed ulterior aims.  Gladly would
he have checked the frantic orgies of cruelty, in which the robbers
indulged on the capture of towns, and which formed the chief reason
why no Italian city voluntarily made common cause with the insurgents;
but the obedience which the bandit-chief found in the conflic
ceased with the victory, and his representations and entreaties
were in vain.  After the victories obtained in the Apennine
in 682 the slave army was free to move in any direction.
Spartacus himself is said to have intended to cross the Alps,
with a view to open to himself and his followers the means of return
to their Celtic or Thracian home: if the statement is well founded,
it shows how little the conqueror overrated his successes
and his power.  When his men refused so speedily to turn their backs
on the riches of Italy, Spartacus took the route for Rome, and is said
to have meditated blockading the capital.  The troops, however,
showed themselves also averse to this desperate but yet methodical
enterprise; they compelled their leader, when he was desirous
to be a general, to remain a mere captain of banditti and aimlessly
to wander about Italy in search of plunder.  Rome might think herself
fortunate that the matter took this turn; but even as it was,
the perplexity was great.  There was a want of trained soldiers
as of experienced generals; Quintus Metellus and Gnaeus Pompeius
were employed in Spain, Marcus Lucullus in Thrace, Lucius Lucullus
in Asia Minor; and none but raw militia and, at best, mediocre
officers were available.  The extraordinary supreme command
in Italy was given to the praetor Marcus Crassus, who was not
a general of much reputation, but had fought with honour under Sulla
and had at least character; and an army of eight legions, imposing
if not by its quality, at any rate by its numbers, was placed
at his disposal.  The new commander-in-chief began by treating
the first division, which again threw away its arms and fled before
the banditti, with all the severity of martial law, and causing every
tenth man in it to be executed; whereupon the legions in reality
grew somewhat more manly.  Spartacus, vanquished in the next
engagement, retreated and sought to reach Rhegium through Lucania.

Conflicts in the Bruttian Country

Just at that time the pirates commanded not merely the Sicilian
waters, but even the port of Syracuse;(26) with the help of their
boats Spartacus proposed to throw a corps into Sicily, where the slaves
only waited an impulse to break out a third time.  The march to Rhegium
was accomplished; but the corsairs, perhaps terrified by the coastguards
established in Sicily by the praetor Gaius Verres, perhaps also bribed
by the Romans, took from Spartacus the stipulated hire without performing
the service for which it was given.  Crassus meanwhile had followed
the robber-army nearly as far as the mouth, of the Crathis,
and, like Scipio before Numantia, ordered his soldiers,
seeing that they did not fight as they ought, to construct
an entrenched wall of the length of thirty-five miles,
which shut off the Bruttian peninsula from the rest of Italy,(27)
intercepted the insurgent army on the return from Rhegium,
and cut off its supplies.  But in a dark winter night Spartacus
broke through the lines of the enemy, and in the spring of 683(28)
was once more in Lucania.  The laborious work had thus been in vain.
Crassus began to despair of accomplishing his task and demanded
that the senate should for his support recall to Italy the armies
stationed in Macedonia under Marcus Lucullus and in Hither Spain
under Gnaeus Pompeius.

Disruption of the Rebels and Their Subjugation

This extreme step however was not needed; the disunion and the arrogance
of the robber-bands sufficed again to frustrate their successes.
Once more the Celts and Germans broke off from the league of which
the Thracian was the head and soul, in order that, under leaders
of their own nation Gannicus and Castus, they might separately
fall victims to the sword of the Romans.  Once, at the Lucanian
lake the opportune appearance of Spartacus saved them,
and thereupon they pitched their camp near to his; nevertheless
Crassus succeeded in giving employment to Spartacus by means
of the cavalry, and meanwhile surrounded the Celtic bands and compelled
them to a separate engagement, in which the whole body--numbering
it is said 12,300 combatants--fell fighting bravely all on the spot
and with their wounds in front.  Spartacus then attempted to throw
himself with his division into the mountains round Petelia (near
Strongoli in Calabria), and signally defeated the Roman vanguard,
which followed his retreat But this victory proved more injurious
to the victor than to the vanquished.  Intoxicated by success,
the robbers refused to retreat farther, and compelled their general
to lead them through Lucania towards Apulia to face the last decisive
struggle.  Before the battle Spartacus stabbed his horse:
as in prosperity and adversity he had faithfully kept by his men,
he now by that act showed them that the issue for him and for all
was victory or death.  In the battle also he fought with the courage
of a lion; two centurions fell by his hand; wounded and on his knees
he still wielded his spear against the advancing foes.
Thus the great robber-captain and with him the best of his comrades
died the death of free men and of honourable soldiers (683).
After the dearly-bought victory the troops who had achieved it,
and those of Pompeius that had meanwhile after conquering the Sertorians
arrived from Spain, instituted throughout Apulia and Lucania a manhunt,
such as there had never been before, to crush out the last sparks
of the mighty conflagration.  Although in the southern districts,
where for instance the little town of Tempsa was seized in 683
by a gang of robbers, and in Etruria, which was severely affected
by Sulla's evictions, there was by no means as yet a real public
tranquillity, peace was officially considered as re-established
in Italy.  At least the disgracefully lost eagles were recovered--
after the victory over the Celts alone five of them were brought
in; and along the road from Capua to Rome the six thousand crosses
bearing captured slaves testified to the re-establishment of order,
and to the renewed victory of acknowledged law over its living
property that had rebelled.

The Government of the Restoration as a Whole

Let us look back on the events which fill up the ten years
of the Sullan restoration.  No one of the movements, external
or internal, which occurred during this period--neither the insurrection
of Lepidus, nor the enterprises of the Spanish emigrants, nor the wars
in Thrace and Macedonia and in Asia Minor, nor the risings
of the pirates and the slaves--constituted of itself a mighty danger
necessarily affecting the vital sinews of the nation; and yet
the state had in all these struggles well-nigh fought for its
very existence.  The reason was that the tasks were everywhere
left unperformed, so long as they might still have been performed
with ease; the neglect of the simplest precautionary measures produced
the most dreadful mischiefs and misfortunes, and transformed
dependent classes and impotent kings into antagonists on a footing
of equality.  The democracy and the servile insurrection
were doubtless subdued; but such as the victories were, the victor
was neither inwardly elevated nor outwardly strengthened by them.
It was no credit to Rome, that the two most celebrated generals
of the government party had during a struggle of eight years marked
by more defeats than victories failed to master the insurgent chief
Sertorius and his Spanish guerillas, and that it was only
the dagger of his friends that decided the Sertorian war in favour
of the legitimate government.  As to the slaves, it was far less
an honour to have conquered them than a disgrace to have confronted
them in equal strife for years.  Little more than a century had
elapsed since the Hannibalic war; it must have brought a blush
to the cheek of the honourable Roman, when he reflected
on the fearfully rapid decline of the nation since that great age.
Then the Italian slaves stood like a wall against the veterans
of Hannibal; now the Italian militia were scattered like chaff before
the bludgeons of their runaway serfs.  Then every plain captain
acted in case of need as general, and fought often without success,
but always with honour; now it was difficult to find among
all the officers of rank a leader of even ordinary efficiency.
Then the government preferred to take the last farmer from the plough
rather than forgo the acquisition of Spain and Greece; now they were
on the eve of again abandoning both regions long since acquired,
merely that they might be able to defend themselves against
the insurgent slaves at home.  Spartacus too as well as Hannibal
had traversed Italy with an army from the Po to the Sicilian straits,
beaten both consuls, and threatened Rome with blockade;
the enterprise which had needed the greatest general of antiquity
to conduct it against the Rome of former days could be undertaken
against the Rome of the present by a daring captain of banditti.
Was there any wonder that no fresh life sprang out of such victories
over insurgents and robber-chiefs?

The external wars, however, had produced a result still less
gratifying.  It is true that the Thraco-Macedonian war had yielded
a result not directly unfavourable, although far from corresponding
to the considerable expenditure of men and money.  In the wars
in Asia Minor and with the pirates on the other hand, the government
had exhibited utter failure.  The former ended with the loss
of the whole conquests made in eight bloody campaigns, the latter
with the total driving of the Romans from "their own sea." Once Rome,
fully conscious of the irresistibleness of her power by land,
had transferred her superiority also to the other element;
now the mighty state was powerless at sea and, as it seemed,
on the point of also losing its dominion at least over the Asiatic
continent.  The material benefits which a state exists to confer--
security of frontier, undisturbed peaceful intercourse, legal protection,
and regulated administration--began all of them to vanish for the whole
of the nations united in the Roman state; the gods of blessing
seemed all to have mounted up to Olympus and to have left
the miserable earth at the mercy of the officially called or volunteer
plunderers and tormentors.  Nor was this decay of the state felt
as a public misfortune merely perhaps by such as had political rights
and public spirit; the insurrection of the proletariate,
and the brigandage and piracy which remind us of the times
of the Neapolitan Ferdinands, carried the sense of this decay
into the remotest valley and the humblest hut of Italy, and made
every one who pursued trade and commerce, or who bought
even a bushel of wheat, feel it as a personal calamity.

If inquiry was made as to the authors of this dreadful and unexampled
misery, it was not difficult to lay the blame of it with good
reason on many.  The slaveholders whose heart was in their
money-bags, the insubordinate soldiers, the generals cowardly,
incapable, or foolhardy, the demagogues of the market-place mostly
pursuing a mistaken aim, bore their share of the blame; or,
to speak more truly, who was there that did not share in it?
It was instinctively felt that this misery, this disgrace, this disorder
were too colossal to be the work of any one man.  As the greatness
of the Roman commonwealth was the work not of prominent individuals,
but rather of a soundly-organized burgess-body, so the decay
of this mighty structure was the result not of the destructive genius
of individuals, but of a general disorganization.  The great majority
of the burgesses were good for nothing, and every rotten stone
in the building helped to bring about the ruin of the whole; the whole
nation suffered for what was the whole nation's fault.  It was unjust
to hold the government, as the ultimate tangible organ of the state,
responsible for all its curable and incurable diseases; but it certainly
was true that the government contributed after a very grave fashion
to the general culpability.  In the Asiatic war, for example,
where no individual of the ruling lords conspicuously failed,
and Lucullus, in a military point of view at least, behaved with ability
and even glory, it was all the more clear that the blame of failure lay
in the system and in the government as such--primarily, so far
as that war was concerned, in the remissness with which Cappadocia
and Syria were at first abandoned, and in the awkward position
of the able general with reference to a governing college incapable
of any energetic resolution.  In maritime police likewise
the true idea which the senate had taken up as to a general hunting
out of the pirates was first spoilt by it in the execution
and then totally dropped, in order to revert to the old foolish system
of sending legions against the coursers of the sea.  The expeditions
of Servilius and Marcius to Cilicia, and of Metellus to Crete,
were undertaken on this system; and in accordance with it Triarius
had the island of Delos surrounded by a wall for protection against
the pirates.  Such attempts to secure the dominion of the seas remind
us of that Persian great-king, who ordered the sea to be scourged
with rods to make it subject to him.  Doubtless therefore
the nation had good reason for laying the blame of its failure
primarily on the government of the restoration.  A similar misrule
had indeed always come along with the re-establishment
of the oligarchy, after the fall of the Gracchi as after that
of Marius and Saturninus; yet never before had it shown such violence
and at the same time such laxity, never had it previously emerged
so corrupt and pernicious.  But, when a government cannot govern,
it ceases to be legitimate, and whoever has the power has also
the right to overthrow it.  It is, no doubt, unhappily true
that an incapable and flagitious government may for a long period trample
under foot the welfare and honour of the land, before the men are
found who are able and willing to wield against that government
the formidable weapons of its own forging, and to evoke out of
the moral revolt of the good and the distress of the many the revolution
which is in such a case legitimate.  But if the game attempted
with the fortunes of nations may be a merry one and may be played
perhaps for a long time without molestation, it is a treacherous
game, which in its own time entraps the players; and no one then
blames the axe, if it is laid to the root of the tree that bears
such fruits.  For the Roman oligarchy this time had now come.
The Pontic-Armenian war and the affair of the pirates became
the proximate causes of the overthrow of the Sullan constitution
and of the establishment of a revolutionary military dictatorship.




Chapter III

The Fall of the Oligarchy and the Rule of Pompeius

Continued Subsistence of the Sullan Constitution

The Sullan constitution still stood unshaken.  The assault,
which Lepidus and Sertorius had ventured to make on it,
had been repulsed with little loss.  The government had neglected,
it is true, to finish the half-completed building in the energetic
spirit of its author.  It is characteristic of the government,
that it neither distributed the lands which Sulla had destined
for allotment but had not yet parcelled out, nor directly abandoned
the claim to them, but tolerated the former owners in provisional
possession without regulating their title, and indeed even allowed
various still undistributed tracts of Sullan domain-land to be
arbitrarily taken possession of by individuals according
to the old system of occupation, which was de jure and de facto
set aside by the Gracchan reforms.(1)  Whatever in the Sullan enactments
was indifferent or inconvenient for the Optimates, was without scruple
ignored or cancelled; for instance, the sentences under which whole
communities were deprived of the right of citizenship, the prohibition
against conjoining the new farms, and several of the privileges
conferred by Sulla on particular communities--of course, without
giving back to the communities the sums paid for these exemptions.
But though these violations of the ordinances of Sulla by the government
itself contributed to shake the foundations of his structure,
the Sempronian laws were substantially abolished and remained so.

Attacks of the Democracy
Corn-Laws
Attempts to Restore the Tribunician Power

There was no lack, indeed, of men who had in view the re-establishment
of the Gracchan constitution, or of projects to attain piecemeal
in the way of constitutional reform what Lepidus and Sertorius
had attempted by the path of revolution.  The government
had already under the pressure of the agitation of Lepidus
immediately after the death of Sulla consented to a limited revival
of the largesses of grain (676); and it did, moreover,
what it could to satisfy the proletariate of the capital in regard
to this vital question.  When, notwithstanding those distributions,
the high price of grain occasioned chiefly by piracy produced
so oppressive a dearth in Rome as to lead to a violent tumult
in the streets in 679, extraordinary purchases of Sicilian grain
on account of the government relieved for the time the most severe
distress; and a corn-law brought in by the consuls of 681 regulated
for the future the purchases of Sicilian grain and furnished
the government, although at the expense of the provincials,
with better means of obviating similar evils.  But the less material
points of difference also--the restoration of the tribunician power
in its old compass, and the setting aside of the senatorial tribunals--
ceased not to form subjects of popular agitation; and in their
case the government offered more decided resistance.  The dispute
regarding the tribunician magistracy was opened as early as 678,
immediately after the defeat of Lepidus, by the tribune of the people
Lucius Sicinius, perhaps a descendant of the man of the same
name who had first filled this office more than four hundred years
before; but it failed before the resistance offered to it
by the active consul Gaius Curio.  In 680 Lucius Quinctius resumed
the agitation, but was induced by the authority of the consul Lucius
Lucullus to desist from his purpose.  The matter was taken up
in the following year with greater zeal by Gaius Licinius Macer, who--
in a way characteristic of the period--carried his literary studies
into public life, and, just as he had read in the Annals,
counselled the burgesses to refuse the conscription.

Attacks on the Senatorial Tribunals

Complaints also, only too well founded, prevailed respecting
the bad administration of justice by the senatorial jurymen.
The condemnation of a man of any influence could hardly be obtained.
Not only did colleague feel reasonable compassion for colleague,
those who had been or were likely to be accused for the poor sinner
under accusation at the moment; the sale also of the votes
of jurymen was hardly any longer exceptional.  Several senators
had been judicially convicted of this crime: men pointed
with the finger at others equally guilty; the most respected Optimates,
such as Quintus Catulus, granted in an open sitting of the senate
that the complaints were quite well founded; individual specially
striking cases compelled the senate on several occasions, e. g. in 680,
to deliberate on measures to check the venality of juries,
but only of course till the first outcry had subsided and the matter
could be allowed to slip out of sight.  The consequences
of this wretched administration of justice appeared especially
in a system of plundering and torturing the provincials, compared
with which even previous outrages seemed tolerable and moderate.
Stealing and robbing had been in some measure legitimized by custom;
the commission on extortions might be regarded as an institution
for taxing the senators returning from the provinces for the benefit
of their colleagues that remained at home.  But when an esteemed
Siceliot, because he had not been ready to help the governor
in a crime, was by the latter condemned to death in his absence
and unheard; when even Roman burgesses, if they were not equites
or senators, were in the provinces no longer safe from the rods
and axes of the Roman magistrate, and the oldest acquisition
of the Roman democracy--security of life and person--began to be
trodden under foot by the ruling oligarchy; then even the public
in the Forum at Rome had an ear for the complaints regarding
its magistrates in the provinces, and regarding the unjust judges
who morally shared the responsibility of such misdeeds.  The opposition
of course did not omit to assail its opponents in--what was almost
the only ground left to it--the tribunals.  The young Gaius Caesar,
who also, so far as his age allowed, took zealous part
in the agitation for the re-establishment of the tribunician power,
brought to trial in 677 one of the most respected partisans
of Sulla the consular Gnaeus Dolabella, and in the following year
another Sullan officer Gaius Antonius; and Marcus Cicero in 684
called to account Gaius Verres, one of the most wretched
of the creatures of Sulla, and one of the worst scourges
of the provincials.  Again and again were the pictures
of that dark period of the proscriptions, the fearful sufferings
of the provincials, the disgraceful state of Roman criminal justice,
unfolded before the assembled multitude with all the pomp
of Italian rhetoric, and with all the bitterness of Italian sarcasm,
and the mighty dead as well as his living instruments were unrelentingly
exposed to their wrath and scorn.  The re-establishment of the full
tribunician power, with the continuance of which the freedom,
might, and prosperity of the republic seemed bound up as by a charm
of primeval sacredness, the reintroduction of the "stern" equestrian
tribunals, the renewal of the censorship, which Sulla had set
aside, for the purifying of the supreme governing board
from its corrupt and pernicious elements, were daily demanded
with a loud voice by the orators of the popular party.

Want of Results from the Democratic Agitation

But with all this no progress was made.  There was scandal
and outcry enough, but no real result was attained by this exposure
of the government according to and beyond its deserts.  The material
power still lay, so long as there was no military interference,
in the hands of the burgesses of the capital; and the "people"
that thronged the streets of Rome and made magistrates and laws
in the Forum, was in fact nowise better than the governing senate.
The government no doubt had to come to terms with the multitude,
where its own immediate interest was at stake; this was the reason
for the renewal of the Sempronian corn-law.  But it was not
to be imagined that this populace would have displayed earnestness
on behalf of an idea or even of a judicious reform.  What Demosthenes
said of his Athenians was justly applied to the Romans
of this period--the people were very zealous for action, so long
as they stood round the platform and listened to proposals of reforms;
but when they went home, no one thought further of what he had
heard in the market-place.  However those democratic agitators might
stir the fire, it was to no purpose, for the inflammable material
was wanting.  The government knew this, and allowed no sort
of concession to be wrung from it on important questions
of principle; at the utmost it consented (about 682) to grant
amnesty to a portion of those who had become exiles with Lepidus.
Any concessions that did take place, came not so much from the pressure
of the democracy as from the attempts at mediation of the moderate
aristocracy.  But of the two laws which the single still surviving
leader of this section Gaius Cotta carried in his consulate of 679,
that which concerned the tribunals was again set aside
in the very next year; and the second, which abolished the Sullan
enactment that those who had held the tribunate should be disqualified
for undertaking other magistracies, but allowed the other limitations
to continue, merely--like every half-measure--excited the displeasure
of both parties.

The party of conservatives friendly to reform which lost
its most notable head by the early death of Cotta occurring soon
after (about 681) dwindled away more and more--crushed between
the extremes, which were becoming daily more marked.  But of these
the party of the government, wretched and remiss as it was,
necessarily retained the advantage in presence of the equally
wretched and equally remiss opposition.

Quarrel between the Government and Their General Pompeius

But this state of matters so favourable to the government
was altered, when the differences became more distinctly developed
which subsisted between it and those of its partisans, whose hopes
aspired to higher objects than the seat of honour in the senate
and the aristocratic villa.  In the first rank of these stood Gnaeus
Pompeius.  He was doubtless a Sullan; but we have already shown(2)
how little he was at home among his own party, how his lineage,
his past history, his hopes separated him withal from the nobility
as whose protector and champion he was officially regarded.
The breach already apparent had been widened irreparably during
the Spanish campaigns of the general (677-683).  With reluctance
and semi-compulsion the government had associated him as colleague
with their true representative Quintus Metellus; and in turn he accused
the senate, probably not without ground, of having by its careless
or malicious neglect of the Spanish armies brought about their
defeats and placed the fortunes of the expedition in jeopardy.
Now he returned as victor over his open and his secret foes,
at the head of an army inured to war and wholly devoted to him,
desiring assignments of land for his soldiers, a triumph
and the consulship for himself.  The latter demands came into
collision with the law.  Pompeius, although several times invested
in an extraordinary way with supreme official authority, had not yet
administered any ordinary magistracy, not even the quaestorship,
and was still not a member of the senate; and none but one
who had passed through the round of lesser ordinary magistracies
could become consul, none but one who had been invested
with the ordinary supreme power could triumph.  The senate
was legally entitled, if he became a candidate for the consulship,
to bid him begin with the quaestorship; if he requested a triumph,
to remind him of the great Scipio, who under like circumstances
had renounced his triumph over conquered Spain.  Nor was Pompeius
less dependent constitutionally on the good will of the senate
as respected the lands promised to his soldiers.  But, although
the senate--as with its feebleness even in animosity
was very conceivable--should yield those points and concede
to the victorious general, in return for his executioner's service
against the democratic chiefs, the triumph, the consulate,
and the assignations of land, an honourable annihilation
in senatorial indolence among the long series of peaceful
senatorial Imperators was the most favourable lot which the oligarchy
was able to hold in readiness for the general of thirty-six.
That which his heart really longed for--the command
in the Mithradatic war--he could never expect to obtain
from the voluntary bestowal of the senate: in their own well-understood
interest the oligarchy could not permit him to add to his Africa
and European trophies those of a third continent; the laurels
which were to be plucked copiously and easily in the east were reserved
at all events for the pure aristocracy.  But if the celebrated general
did not find his account in the ruling oligarchy, there remained--
for neither was the time ripe, nor was the temperament of Pompeius
at all fitted, for a purely personal outspoken dynastic policy--
no alternative save to make common cause with the democratic party.
No interest of his own bound him to the Sullan constitution;
he could pursue his personal objects quite as well, if not better,
with one more democratic.  On the other hand he found all that he needed
in the democratic party.  Its active and adroit leaders were ready
and able to relieve the resourceless and somewhat wooden hero
of the trouble of political leadership, and yet much too insignificant
to be able or even wishful to dispute with the celebrated general
the first place and especially the supreme military control.  Even
Gaius Caesar, by far the most important of them, was simply a young
man whose daring exploits and fashionable debts far more than his
fiery democratic eloquence had gained him a name, and who could not
but feel himself greatly honoured when the world-renowned Imperator
allowed him to be his political adjutant.  That popularity,
to which men like Pompeius, with pretensions greater than their
abilities, usually attach more value than they are willing
to confess to themselves, could not but fall in the highest measure
to the lot of the young general whose accession gave victory
to the almost forlorn cause of the democracy.  The reward of victory
claimed by him for himself and his soldiers would then follow
of itself.  In general it seemed, if the oligarchy were overthrown,
that amidst the total want of other considerable chiefs
of the opposition it would depend solely on Pompeius himself
to determine his future position.  And of this much there could
hardly be a doubt, that the accession of the general of the army,
which had just returned victorious from Spain and still stood compact
and unbroken in Italy, to the party of opposition must have
as its consequence the fall of the existing order of things.
Government and opposition were equally powerless; so soon as
the latter no longer fought merely with the weapons of declamation,
but had the sword of a victorious general ready to back its demands,
the government would be in any case overcome, perhaps even
without a struggle.

Coalition of the Military Chiefs and the Democracy

Pompeius and the democrats thus found themselves urged
into coalition.  Personal dislikings were probably not wanting
on either side: it was not possible that the victorious general
could love the street orators, nor could these hail with pleasure
as their chief the executioner of Carbo and Brutus; but political
necessity outweighed at least for the moment all moral scruples.

The democrats and Pompeius, however, were not the sole parties
to the league.  Marcus Crassus was in a similar situation
with Pompeius.  Although a Sullan like the latter, his politics
were quite as in the case of Pompeius preeminently of a personal kind,
and by no means those of the ruling oligarchy; and he too was now
in Italy at the head of a large and victorious army, with which
he had just suppressed the rising of the slaves.  He had to choose
whether he would ally himself with the oligarchy against the coalition,
or enter that coalition: he chose the latter, which was doubtless
the safer course.  With his colossal wealth and his influence
on the clubs of the capital he was in any case a valuable
ally; but under the prevailing circumstances it was an incalculable
gain, when the only army, with which the senate could have met
the troops of Pompeius, joined the attacking force.  The democrats
moreover, who were probably somewhat uneasy at their alliance
with that too powerful general, were not displeased to see
a counterpoise and perhaps a future rival associated with him
in the person of Marcus Crassus.

Thus in the summer of 683 the first coalition took place between
the democracy on the one hand, and the two Sullan generals Gnaeus
Pompeius and Marcus Crassus on the other.  The generals adopted
the party-programme of the democracy; and they were promised
immediately in return the consulship for the coming year, while
Pompeius was to have also a triumph and the desired allotments
of land for his soldiers, and Crassus as the conqueror of Spartacus
at least the honour of a solemn entrance into the capital.

To the two Italian armies, the great capitalists,
and the democracy, which thus came forward in league for the overthrow
of the Sullan constitution, the senate had nothing to oppose save
perhaps the second Spanish army under Quintus Metellus Pius.
But Sulla had truly predicted that what he did would not be done
a second time; Metellus, by no means inclined to involve himself
in a civil war, had discharged his soldiers immediately after crossing
the Alps.  So nothing was left for the oligarchy but to submit
to what was inevitable.  The senate granted the dispensations
requisite for the consulship and triumph; Pompeius and Crassus
were, without opposition, elected consuls for 684, while their
armies, on pretext of awaiting their triumph, encamped before
the city.  Pompeius thereupon, even before entering on office,
gave his public and formal adherence to the democratic programme
in an assembly of the people held by the tribune Marcus Lollius
Palicanus.  The change of the constitution was thus
in principle decided.

Re-establishing of the Tribunician Power

They now went to work in all earnest to set aside the Sullan
institutions.  First of all the tribunician magistracy regained
its earlier authority.  Pompeius himself as consul introduced the law
which gave back to the tribunes of the people their time-honoured
prerogatives, and in particular the initiative of legislation--
a singular gift indeed from the hand of a man who had done more than
any one living to wrest from the community its ancient privileges.

New Arrangement as to Jurymen

With respect to the position of jurymen, the regulation of Sulla,
that the roll of the senators was to serve as the list of jurymen,
was no doubt abolished; but this by no means led to a simple
restoration of the Gracchan equestrian courts.  In future--so it
was enacted by the new Aurelian law--the colleges of jurymen
were to consist one-third of senators and two-thirds of men
of equestrian census, and of the latter the half must have rilled
the office of district-presidents, or so-called -tribuni aerarii-.
This last innovation was a farther concession made to the democrats,
inasmuch as according to it at least a third part of the criminal
jurymen were indirectly derived from the elections of the tribes.
The reason, again, why the senate was not totally excluded
from the courts is probably to be sought partly in the relations
of Crassus to the senate, partly in the accession of the senatorial
middle party to the coalition; with which is doubtless connected
the circumstance that this law was brought in by the praetor Lucius
Cotta, the brother of their lately deceased leader.

Renewal of the Asiatic Revenue-Farming

Not less important was the abolition of the arrangements
as to taxation established for Asia by Sulla,(3) which presumably
likewise fell to this year.  The governor of Asia at that time,
Lucius Lucullus, was directed to reestablish the system of farming
the revenue introduced by Gaius Gracchus; and thus this important
source of money and power was restored to the great capitalists.

Renewal of the Censorship

Lastly, the censorship was revived.  The elections for it,
which the new consuls fixed shortly after entering on their office,
fell, in evident mockery of the senate, on the two consuls of 682,
Gnaeus Lentulus Clodianus and Lucius Gellius, who had been removed
by the senate from their commands on account of their wretched
management of the war against Spartacus.(4)  It may readily be conceived
that these men put in motion all the means which their important
and grave office placed at their command, for the purpose of doing
homage to the new-holders of power and of annoying the senate.
At least an eighth part of the senate, sixty-four senators, a number
hitherto unparalleled, were deleted from the roll, including Gaius
Antonius, formerly impeached without success by Gaius Caesar,(5)
and Publius Lentulus Sura, the consul of 683, and presumably also
not a few of the most obnoxious creatures of Sulla.

The New Constitution

Thus in 684 they had reverted in the main to the arrangements
that subsisted before the Sullan restoration.

Again the multitude of the capital was fed from the state-chest,
in other words by the provinces;(6) again the tribunician authority
gave to every demagogue a legal license to overturn the arrangements
of the state; again the moneyed nobility, as farmers of the revenue
and possessed of the judicial control over the governors, raised their
heads alongside of the government as powerfully as ever; again the senate
trembled before the verdict of jurymen of the equestrian order and before
the censorial censure.  The system of Sulla, which had based the monopoly
of power by the nobility on the political annihilation of the mercantile
aristocracy and of demagogism, was thus completely overthrown.
Leaving out of view some subordinate enactments, the abolition
of which was not overtaken till afterwards, such as the restoration
of the right of self-completion to the priestly colleges,(7) nothing
of the general ordinances of Sulla survived except, on the one hand,
the concessions which he himself found it necessary to make
to the opposition, such as the recognition of the Roman franchise
of all the Italians, and, on the other hand, enactments without
any marked partisan tendency, and with which therefore even judicious
democrats found no fault--such as, among others, the restriction
of the freedmen, the regulation of the functional spheres
of the magistrates, and the material alterations in criminal law.

The coalition was more agreed regarding these questions
of principle than with respect to the personal questions which such
a political revolution raised.  As might be expected, the democrats
were not content with the general recognition of their programme;
but they too now demanded a restoration in their sense--revival
of the commemoration of their dead, punishment of the murderers,
recall of the proscribed from exile, removal of the political
disqualification that lay on their children, restoration
of the estates confiscated by Sulla, indemnification at the expense
of the heirs and assistants of the dictator.  These were certainly
the logical consequences which ensued from a pure victory
of the democracy; but the victory of the coalition of 683 was very far
from being such.  The democracy gave to it their name and their
programme, but it was the officers who had joined the movement,
and above all Pompeius, that gave to it power and completion; and these
could never yield their consent to a reaction which would not only
have shaken the existing state of things to its foundations,
but would have ultimately turned against themselves--men still had
a lively recollection who the men were whose blood Pompeius had shed,
and how Crassus had laid the foundation of his enormous fortune.
It was natural therefore, but at the same time significant
of the weakness of the democracy, that the coalition of 683 took
not the slightest step towards procuring for the democrats revenge
or even rehabilitation.  The supplementary collection of all
the purchase money still outstanding for confiscated estates
bought by auction, or even remitted to the purchasers by Sulla--
for which the censor Lentulus provided in a special law--
can hardly be regarded as an exception; for though not a few Sullans
were thereby severely affected in their personal interests,
yet the measure itself was essentially a confirmation
of the confiscations undertaken by Sulla.

Impending Miliatry Dictatorship of Pompeius

The work of Sulla was thus destroyed; but what the future order
of things was to be, was a question raised rather than decided by
that destruction.  The coalition, kept together solely by the common
object of setting aside the work of restoration, dissolved
of itself, if not formally, at any rate in reality, when that object
was attained; while the question, to what quarter the preponderance
of power was in the first instance to fall, seemed approaching
an equally speedy and violent solution.  The armies of Pompeius
and Crassus still lay before the gates of the city.  The former had
indeed promised to disband his soldiers after his triumph (last day
of Dec. 683); but he had at first omitted to do so, in order to let
the revolution in the state be completed without hindrance
under the pressure which the Spanish army in front of the capital
exercised over the city and the senate--a course, which in like manner
applied to the army of Crassus.  This reason now existed
no longer; but still the dissolution of the armies was postponed.
In the turn taken by matters it looked as if one of the two generals
allied with the democracy would seize the military dictatorship
and place oligarchs and democrats in the same chains.  And this one
could only be Pompeius.  From the first Crassus had played
a subordinate part in the coalition; he had been obliged to propose
himself, and owed even his election to the consulship mainly
to the proud intercession of Pompeius.  Far the stronger, Pompeius
was evidently master of the situation; if he availed himself of it,
it seemed as if he could not but become what the instinct
of the multitude even now designated him--the absolute ruler
of the mightiest state in the civilized world.  Already the whole mass
of the servile crowded around the future monarch.  Already his weaker
opponents were seeking their last resource in a new coalition;
Crassus, full of old and recent jealousy towards the younger rival
who so thoroughly outstripped him, made approaches to the senate
and attempted by unprecedented largesses to attach to himself
the multitude of the capital--as if the oligarchy which Crassus himself
had helped to break down, and the ever ungrateful multitude,
would have been able to afford any protection whatever against
the veterans of the Spanish army.  For a moment it seemed as if
the armies of Pompeius and Crassus would come to blows before
the gates of the capital.

Retirement of Pompeius

But the democrats averted this catastrophe by their sagacity
and their pliancy.  For their party too, as well as for the senate
and Crassus, it was all-important that Pompeius should not seize
the dictatorship; but with a truer discernment of their own weakness
and of the character of their powerful opponent their leaders tried
the method of conciliation.  Pompeius lacked no condition
for grasping at the crown except the first of all--proper kingly
courage.  We have already described the man--with his effort to be
at once loyal republican and master of Rome, with his vacillation
and indecision, with his pliancy that concealed itself
under the boasting of independent resolution.  This was the first
great trial to which destiny subjected him; and he failed to stand it.
The pretext under which Pompeius refused to dismiss the army was,
that he distrusted Crassus and therefore could not take the initiative
in disbanding the soldiers.  The democrats induced Crassus to make
gracious advances in the matter, and to offer the hand of peace
to his colleague before the eyes of all; in public and in private they
besought the latter that to the double merit of having vanquished
the enemy and reconciled the parties he would add the third and yet
greater service of preserving internal peace to his country,
and banishing the fearful spectre of civil war with which
they were threatened.  Whatever could tell on a vain, unskilful,
vacillating man--all the flattering arts of diplomacy, all the theatrical
apparatus of patriotic enthusiasm--was put in motion to obtain
the desired result; and--which was the main point--things had
by the well-timed compliance of Crassus assumed such a shape,
that Pompeius had no alternative but either to come forward openly
as tyrant of Rome or to retire.  So he at length yielded and consented
to disband the troops.  The command in the Mithradatic war,
which he doubtless hoped to obtain when he had allowed himself to be
chosen consul for 684, he could not now desire, since Lucullus
seemed to have practically ended that war with the campaign of 683.
He deemed it beneath his dignity to accept the consular province
assigned to him by the senate in accordance with the Sempronian
law, and Crassus in this followed his example.  Accordingly
when Pompeius after discharging his soldiers resigned his consulship
on the last day of 684, he retired for the time wholly from public
affairs, and declared that he wished thenceforth to live a life
of quiet leisure as a simple citizen.  He had taken up such a position
that he was obliged to grasp at the crown; and, seeing that he was
not willing to do so, no part was left to him but the empty one
of a candidate for a throne resigning his pretensions to it.

Senate, Equites, and Populares

The retirement of the man, to whom as things stood the first place
belonged, from the political stage reproduced in the first instance
nearly the same position of parties, which we found in the Gracchan
and Marian epochs.  Sulla had merely strengthened the senatorial
government, not created it; so, after the bulwarks erected by Sulla
had fallen, the government nevertheless remained primarily
with the senate, although, no doubt, the constitution with which
it governed--in the main the restored Gracchan constitution--
was pervaded by a spirit hostile to the oligarchy.  The democracy
had effected the re-establishment of the Gracchan constitution;
but without a new Gracchus it was a body without a head,
and that neither Pompeius nor Crassus could be permanently such a head,
was in itself clear and had been made still clearer by the recent
events.  So the democratic opposition, for want of a leader
who could have directly taken the helm, had to content itself
for the time being with hampering and annoying the government
at every step.  Between the oligarchy, however, and the democracy
there rose into new consideration the capitalist party,
which in the recent crisis had made common cause with the latter,
but which the oligarchs now zealously endeavoured to draw over
to their side, so as to acquire in it a counterpoise to the democracy.
Thus courted on both sides the moneyed lords did not neglect to turn
their advantageous position to profit, and to have the only one
of their former privileges which they had not yet regained--the fourteen
benches reserved for the equestrian order in the theatre--now (687)
restored to them by decree of the people.  On the whole, without
abruptly breaking with the democracy, they again drew closer
to the government.  The very relations of the senate to Crassus
and his clients point in this direction; but a better understanding
between the senate and the moneyed aristocracy seems to have been
chiefly brought about by the fact, that in 686 the senate withdrew
from Lucius Lucullus the ablest of the senatorial officers,
at the instance of the capitalists whom he had sorely annoyed,
the dministration of the province of Asia so important
for their purposes.(8)

The Events in the East, and Their Reaction on Rome

But while the factions of the capital were indulging in their
wonted mutual quarrels, which they were never able to bring
to any proper decision, events in the east followed their fatal course,
as we have already described; and it was these events that brought
the dilatory course of the politics of the capital to a crisis.
The war both by land and by sea had there taken a most unfavourable
turn.  In the beginning of 687 the Pontic army of the Romans
was destroyed, and their Armenian army was utterly breaking up
on its retreat; all their conquests were lost, the sea was exclusively
in the power of the pirates, and the price of grain in Italy
was thereby so raised that they were afraid of an actual famine.
No doubt, as we saw, the faults of the generals, especially
the utter incapacity of the admiral Marcus Antonius and the temerity
of the otherwise able Lucius Lucullus, were in part the occasion
of these calamities; no doubt also the democracy had by its
revolutionary agitations materially contributed to the breaking up
of the Armenian army.  But of course the government was now held
cumulatively responsible for all the mischief which itself
and others had occasioned, and the indignant hungry multitude
desired only an opportunity to settle accounts with the senate.

Reappearance of Pompeius

It was a decisive crisis.  The oligarchy, though degraded
and disarmed, was not yet overthrown, for the management of public
affairs was still in the hands of the senate; but it would fall,
if its opponents should appropriate to themselves that management,
and more especially the superintendence of military affairs;
and now this was possible.  If proposals for another and better
management of the war by land and sea were now submitted to the comitia,
the senate was obviously--looking to the temper of the burgesses--
not in a position to prevent their passing; and an interference
of the burgesses in these supreme questions of administration
was practically the deposition of the senate and the transference
of the conduct of the state to the leaders of opposition.  Once more
the concatenation of events brought the decision into the hands
of Pompeius.  For more than two years the famous general had lived
as a private citizen in the capital.  His voice was seldom heard
in the senate-house or in the Forum; in the former he was unwelcome
and without decisive influence, in the latter he was afraid
of the stormy proceedings of the parties.  But when he did show himself,
it was with the full retinue of his clients high and low,
and the very solemnity of his reserve imposed on the multitude.
If he, who was still surrounded with the full lustre of his extraordinary
successes, should now offer to go to the east, he would beyond
doubt be readily invested by the burgesses with all the plenitude
of military and political power which he might himself ask.
For the oligarchy, which saw in the political-military dictatorship
their certain ruin, and in Pompeius himself since the coalition
of 683 their most hated foe, this was an overwhelming blow;
but the democratic party also could have little comfort in the prospect.
However desirable the putting an end to the government of the senate
could not but be in itself, it was, if it took place in this way,
far less a victory for their party than a personal victory
for their over-powerful ally.  In the latter there might easily arise
a far more dangerous opponent to the democratic party than the senate
had been.  The danger fortunately avoided a few years before
by the disbanding of the Spanish army and the retirement of Pompeius
would recur in increased measure, if Pompeius should now be placed
at the head of the armies of the east.

Overthrow of the Senatorial Rule, and New Power of Pompeius

On this occasion, however, Pompeius acted or at least allowed
others to act in his behalf.  In 687 two projects of law
were introduced, one of which, besides decreeing the discharge--
long since demanded by the democracy--of the soldiers of the Asiatic
army who had served their term, decreed the recall of its
commander-in-chief Lucius Lucullus and the supplying of his place
by one of the consuls of the current year, Gaius Piso or Manius
Glabrio; while the second revived and extended the plan proposed
seven years before by the senate itself for clearing the seas
from the pirates.  A single general to be named by the senate
from the consulars was to be appointed, to hold by sea exclusive command
over the whole Mediterranean from the Pillars of Hercules to the coasts
of Pontus and Syria, and to exercise by land, concurrently
with the respective Roman governors, supreme command over the whole
coasts for fifty miles inland.  The office was secured to him
for three years.  He was surrounded by a staff, such as Rome
had never seen, of five-and-twenty lieutenants of senatorial rank,
all invested with praetorian insignia and praetorian powers,
and of two under-treasurers with quaestorian prerogatives, all of them
selected by the exclusive will of the general commanding-in-chief.
He was allowed to raise as many as 120,000 infantry, 5000 cavalry,
500 ships of war, and for this purpose to dispose absolutely
of the means of the provinces and client-states; moreover, the existing
vessels of war and a considerable number of troops were at once
handed over to him.  The treasures of the state in the capital
and in the provinces as well as those of the dependent communities
were to be placed absolutely at his command, and in spite of the severe
financial distress a sum of; 1,400,000 pounds (144,000,000 sesterces)
was at once to be paid to him from the state-chest.

Effect of the Projects of Law

It is clear that by these projects of law, especially
by that which related to the expedition against the pirates,
the government of the senate was set aside.  Doubtless the ordinary
supreme magistrates nominated by the burgesses were of themselves
the proper generals of the commonwealth, and the extraordinary
magistrates needed, at least according to strict law, confirmation
by the burgesses in order to act as generals; but in the appointment
to particular commands no influence constitutionally belonged
to the community, and it was only on the proposition of the senate,
or at any rate on that of a magistrate entitled in himself
to hold the office of general, that the comitia had hitherto
now and again interfered in this matter and conferred
such special functions.  In this field, ever since there had existed
a Roman free state, the practically decisive voice pertained
to the senate, and this its prerogative had in the course of time
obtained full recognition.  No doubt the democracy had already
assailed it; but even in the most doubtful of the cases which had
hitherto occurred--the transference of the African command
to Gaius Marius in 647(9)--it was only a magistrate constitutionally
entitled to hold the office of general that was entrusted
by the resolution of the burgesses with a definite expedition.

But now the burgesses were to invest any private man at their
pleasure not merely with the extraordinary authority of the supreme
magistracy, but also with a sphere of office definitely settled
by them.  That the senate had to choose this man from the ranks
of the consulars, was a mitigation only in form; for the selection
was left to it simply because there was really no choice,
and in presence of the vehemently excited multitude the senate
could entrust the chief command of the seas and coasts to no other
save Pompeius alone.  But more dangerous still than this negation
in principle of the senatorial control was its practical abolition
by the institution of an office of almost unlimited military
and financial powers.  While the office of general was formerly
restricted to a term of one year, to a definite province,
and to military and financial resources strictly measured out,
the new extraordinary office had from the outset a duration
of three years secured to it--which of course did not exclude
a farther prolongation; had the greater portion of all the provinces,
and even Italy itself which was formerly free from military
jurisdiction, subordinated to it; had the soldiers, ships,
treasures of the state placed almost without restriction
at its disposal.  Even the primitive fundamental principle
in the state-law of the Roman republic, which we have just mentioned--
that the highest military and civil authority could not be conferred
without the co-operation of the burgesses--was infringed in favour
of the new commander-in-chief.  Inasmuch as the law conferred beforehand
on the twenty-five adjutants whom he was to nominate praetorian
rank and praetorian prerogatives,(10) the highest office
of republican Rome became subordinate to a newly created office,
for which it was left to the future to find the fitting name,
but which in reality even now involved in it the monarchy.
It was a total revolution in the existing order of things,
for which the foundation was laid in this project of law.

Pompeius and the Gabinian Laws

These measures of a man who had just given so striking proofs
of his vacillation and weakness surprise us by their decisive energy.
Nevertheless the fact that Pompeius acted on this occasion
more resolutely than during his consulate is very capable of explanation.
The point at issue was not that he should come forward at once
as monarch, but only that he should prepare the way for the monarchy
by a military exceptional measure, which, revolutionary
as it was in its nature, could still be accomplished under the forms
of the existing constitution, and which in the first instance
carried Pompeius so far on the way towards the old object
of his wishes, the command against Mithradates and Tigranes.
Important reasons of expediency also might be urged for the emancipation
of the military power from the senate.  Pompeius could not
have forgotten that a plan designed on exactly similar
principles for the suppression of piracy had a few years before
failed through the mismanagement of the senate, and that the issue
of the Spanish war had been placed in extreme jeopardy by the neglect
of the armies on the part of the senate and its injudicious conduct
of the finances; he could not fail to see what were the feelings
with which the great majority of the aristocracy regarded
him as a renegade Sullan, and what fate was in store for him,
if he allowed himself to be sent as general of the government
with the usual powers to the east.  It was natural therefore
that he should indicate a position independent of the senate
as the first condition of his undertaking the command,
and that the burgesses should readily agree to it.  It is moreover
in a high degree probable that Pompeius was on this occasion urged
to more rapid action by those around him, who were, it may be presumed,
not a little indignant at his retirement two years before.  The projects
of law regarding the recall of Lucullus and the expedition against
the pirates were introduced by the tribune of the people Aulus
Gabinius, a man ruined in finances and morals, but a dexterous
negotiator, a bold orator, and a brave soldier.  Little as the assurance
of Pompeius, that he had no wish at all for the chief command
in the war with the pirates and only longed for domestic
repose, were meant in earnest, there was probably this much
of truth in them, that the bold and active client, who was
in confidential intercourse with Pompeius and his more immediate
circle and who completely saw through the situation and the men,
took the decision to a considerable extent out of the hands
of his shortsighted and resourceless patron.

The Parties in Relation to the Gabinian Laws

The democracy, discontented as its leaders might be in secret,
could not well come publicly forward against the project of law.
It would, to all appearance, have been in no case able to hinder
the carrying of the law; but it would by opposition have openly
broken with Pompeius and thereby compelled him either to make
approaches to the oligarchy or regardlessly to pursue his personal
policy in the face of both parties.  No course was left
to the democrats but still even now to adhere to their alliance
with Pompeius, hollow as it was, and to embrace the present opportunity
of at least definitely overthrowing the senate and passing over
from opposition into government, leaving the ulterior issue
to the future and to the well-known weakness of Pompeius' character.
Accordingly their leaders--the praetor Lucius Quinctius, the same
who seven years before had exerted himself for the restoration
of the tribunician power,(11) and the former quaestor Gaius Caesar--
supported the Gabinian proposals.

The privileged classes were furious--not merely the nobility,
but also the mercantile aristocracy, which felt its exclusive
rights endangered by so thorough a state-revolution and once
more recognized its true patron in the senate.  When the tribune
Gabinius after the introduction of his proposals appeared
in the senate-house, the fathers of the city were almost on the point
of strangling him with their own hands, without considering in their
zeal how extremely disadvantageous for them this method of arguing
must have ultimately proved.  The tribune escaped to the Forum
and summoned the multitude to storm the senate-house, when just
at the right time the sitting terminated.  The consul Piso,
the champion of the oligarchy, who accidentally fell into the hands
of the multitude, would have certainly become a victim to popular fury,
had not Gabinius come up and, in order that his certain success
might not be endangered by unseasonable acts of violence, liberated
the consul.  Meanwhile the exasperation of the multitude remained
undiminished and constantly found fresh nourishment in the high
prices of grain and the numerous rumours more or less absurd
which were in circulation--such as that Lucius Lucullus had invested
the money entrusted to him for carrying on the war at interest in Rome,
or had attempted with its aid to make the praetor Quinctius withdraw
from the cause of the people; that the senate intended to prepare
for the "second Romulus," as they called Pompeius, the fate
of the first,(12) and other reports of a like character.

The Vote

Thereupon the day of voting arrived.  The multitude stood densely
packed in the Forum; all the buildings, whence the rostra could
be seen, were covered up to the roofs with men.  All the colleagues
of Gabinius had promised their veto to the senate; but in presence
of the surging masses all were silent except the single Lucius
Trebellius, who had sworn to himself and the senate rather
to die than yield.  When the latter exercised his veto,
Gabinius immediately interrupted the voting on his projects of law
and proposed to the assembled people to deal with his
refractory colleague, as Octavius had formerly been dealt with
on the proposition of Tiberius Gracchus,(13) namely, to depose him
immediately from office.  The vote was taken and the reading
out of the voting tablets began; when the first seventeen tribes,
which came to be read out, had declared for the proposal
and the next affirmative vote would give to it the majority,
Trebellius, forgetting his oath, pusillanimously withdrew his veto.
In vain the tribune Otho then endeavoured to procure that at least
the collegiate principle might be preserved, and two generals
elected instead of one; in vain the aged Quintus Catulus,
the most respected man in the senate, exerted his last energies
to secure that the lieutenant-generals should not be nominated
by the commander-in-chief, but chosen by the people.  Otho could
not even procure a hearing amidst the noise of the multitude;
the well-calculated complaisance of Gabinius procured a hearing
for Catulus, and in respectful silence the multitude listened
to the old man's words; but they were none the less thrown away.
The proposals were not merely converted into law with all the clauses
unaltered, but the supplementary requests in detail made by Pompeius
were instantaneously and completely agreed to.

Successes of Pompeius in the East

With high-strung hopes men saw the two generals Pompeius and Glabrio
depart for their places of destination.  The price of grain
had fallen immediately after the passing of the Gabinian laws
to the ordinary rates--an evidence of the hopes attached to the grand
expedition and its glorious leader.  These hopes were, as we shall
have afterwards to relate, not merely fulfilled, but surpassed:
in three months the clearing of the seas was completed.
Since the Hannibalic war the Roman government had displayed
no such energy in external action; as compared with the lax
and incapable administration of the oligarchy, the democratic--
military opposition had most brilliantly made good its title
to grasp and wield the reins of the state.  The equally unpatriotic
and unskilful attempts of the consul Piso to put paltry obstacles
in the way of the arrangements of Pompeius for the suppression of piracy
in Narbonese Gaul only increased the exasperation of the burgesses
against the oligarchy and their enthusiasm for Pompeius; it was nothing
but the personal intervention of the latter, that prevented the assembly
of the people from summarily removing the consul from his office.

Meanwhile the confusion on the Asiatic continent had become still
worse.  Glabrio, who was to take up in the stead of Lucullus
the chief command against Mithradates and Tigranes, had remained
stationary in the west of Asia Minor and, while instigating
the soldiers by various proclamations against Lucullus, had not entered
on the supreme command, so that Lucullus was forced to retain it.
Against Mithradates, of course, nothing was done; the Pontic
cavalry plundered fearlessly and with impunity in Bithynia
and Cappadocia.  Pompeius had been led by the piratical war to proceed
with his army to Asia Minor; nothing seemed more natural than
to invest him with the supreme command in the Pontic-Armenian war,
to which he himself had long aspired.  But the democratic party did
not, as may be readily conceived, share the wishes of its general,
and carefully avoided taking the initiative in the matter.
It is very probable that it had induced Gabinius not to entrust
both the war with Mithradates and that with the pirates from the outset
to Pompeius, but to entrust the former to Glabrio; upon no account
could it now desire to increase and perpetuate the exceptional
position of the already too-powerful general.  Pompeius himself
retained according to his custom a passive attitude; and perhaps
he would in reality have returned home after fulfilling the commission
which he had received, but for the occurrence of an incident
unexpected by all parties.

The Manillian Law

One Gaius Manilius, an utterly worthless and insignificant man
had when tribune of the people by his unskilful projects of legislation
lost favour both with the aristocracy and with the democracy.
In the hope of sheltering himself under the wing of the powerful
general, if he should procure for the latter what every one knew
that he eagerly desired but had not the boldness to ask, Manilius
proposed to the burgesses to recall the governors Glabrio
from Bithynia and Pontus and Marcius Rex from Cilicia, and to entrust
their offices as well as the conduct of the war in the east,
apparently without any fixed limit as to time and at any rate
with the freest authority to conclude peace and alliance,
to the proconsul of the seas and coasts in addition to his previous
office (beg. of 688).  This occurrence very clearly showed how
disorganized was the machinery of the Roman constitution,
whenthe power of legislation was placed as respected the initiative
inthe hands of any demagogue however insignificant, and as respected
the final determination in the hands of the incapable multitude,
while it at the same time was extended to the most important questions
of administration.  The Manilian proposal was acceptable to none of
the political parties; yet it scarcely anywhere encountered serious
resistance.  The democratic leaders, for the same reasons which had
forced them to acquiesce in the Gabinian law, could not venture
earnestly to oppose the Manilian; they kept their displeasure
and their fears to themselves and spoke in public for the general
of the democracy.  The moderate Optimates declared themselves
for the Manilian proposal, because after the Gabinian law resistance
in any case was vain, and far-seeing men already perceived
that the true policy for the senate was to make approaches
as far as possible to Pompeius and to draw him over to their side
on occasion of the breach which might be foreseen between him
and the democrats.  Lastly the trimmers blessed the day
when they too seemed to have an opinion and could come forward
decidedly without losing favour with either of the parties--
it is significant that Marcus Cicero first appeared as an orator
on the political platform in defence of the Manilian proposal.
The strict Optimates alone, with Quintus Catulus at their head,
showed at least their colours and spoke against the proposition.
Of course it was converted into law by a majority bordering on unanimity.
Pompeius thus obtained, in addition to his earlier extensive powers,
the administration of the most important provinces of Asia Minor--
so that there scarcely remained a spot of land within the wide Roman
bounds that had not to obey him--and the conduct of a war as to which,
like the expedition of Alexander, men could tell where and when
it began, but not where and when it might end.  Never since Rome
stood had such power been united in the hands of a single man.

The Democratic-Military Revolution

The Gabinio-Manilian proposals terminated the struggle between
the senate and the popular party, which the Sempronian laws had begun
sixty-seven years before.  As the Sempronian laws first constituted
the revolutionary party into a political opposition, the Gabinio-
Manilian first converted it from an opposition into the government;
and as it had been a great moment when the first breach
in the existing constitution was made by disregarding the veto
of Octavius, it was a moment no less full of significance
when the last bulwark of the senatorial rule fell with the withdrawal
of Trebellius.  This was felt on both sides and even the indolent
souls of the senators were convulsively roused by this death-
struggle; but yet the war as to the constitution terminated
in a very different and far more pitiful fashion than it had begun.
A youth in every sense noble had commenced the revolution;
it was concluded by pert intriguers and demagogues of the lowest type.
On the other hand, while the Optimates had begun the struggle
with a measured resistance and with a defence which earnestly held out
even at the forlorn posts, they ended with taking the initiative
in club-law, with grandiloquent weakness, and with pitiful perjury.
What had once appeared a daring dream, was now attained; the senate
had ceased to govern.  But when the few old men who had seen
the first storms of revolution and heard the words of the Gracchi,
compared that time with the present they found that everything
had in the interval changed--countrymen and citizens, state-law
and military discipline, life and manners; and well might those
painfully smile, who compared the ideals of the Gracchan period
with their realization.  Such reflections however belonged
to the past.  For the present and perhaps also for the future the fall
of the aristocracy was an accomplished fact.  The oligarchs resembled
an army utterly broken up, whose scattered bands might serve
to reinforce another body of troops, but could no longer themselves
keep the field or risk a combat on their own account.  But as
the old struggle came to an end, a new one was simultaneously
beginning--the struggle between the two powers hitherto leagued
for the overthrow of the aristocratic constitution, the civil-
democratic opposition and the military power daily aspiring
to greater ascendency.  The exceptional position of Pompeius
even under the Gabinian, and much more under the Manilian,
law was incompatible with a republican organization.  He had been
as even then his opponents urged with good reason, appointed
by the Gabinian law not as admiral, but as regent of the empire;
not unjustly was he designated by a Greek familiar with eastern
affairs "king of kings." If he should hereafter, on returning
from the east once more victorious and with increased glory,
with well-filled chests, and with troops ready for battle and devoted
to his cause, stretch forth his hand to seize the crown--who would
then arrest his arm?  Was the consular Quintus Catulus, forsooth,
to summon forth the senators against the first general of his time
and his experienced legions? or was the designated aedile Gaius Caesar
to call forth the civic multitude, whose eyes he had just feasted
on his three hundred and twenty pairs of gladiators with their silver
equipments? Soon, exclaimed Catulus, it would be necessary once
more to flee to the rocks of the Capitol, in order to save liberty.
It was not the fault of the prophet, that the storm came not,
as he expected, from the east, but that on the contrary fate,
fulfilling his words more literally than he himself anticipated,
brought on the destroying tempest a few years later from Gaul.




Chapter IV

Pompeius and the East

Pompeius Suppresses Piracy

We have already seen how wretched was the state of the affairs
of Rome by land and sea in the east, when at the commencement of 687
Pompeius, with an almost unlimited plenitude of power, undertook
the conduct of the war against the pirates.  He began by dividing
the immense field committed to him into thirteen districts
and assigning each of these districts to one of his lieutenants,
for the purpose of equipping ships and men there, of searching
the coasts, and of capturing piratical vessels or chasing them
into the meshes of a colleague.  He himself went with the best part
of the ships of war that were available--among which on this occasion
also those of Rhodes were distinguished--early in the year to sea,
and swept in the first place the Sicilian, African, and Sardinian
waters, with a view especially to re-establish the supply of grain
from these provinces to Italy.  His lieutenants meanwhile addressed
themselves to the clearing of the Spanish and Gallic coasts.
It was on this occasion that the consul Gaius Piso attempted
from Rome to prevent the levies which Marcus Pomponius, the legate
of Pompeius, instituted by virtue of the Gabinian law in the province
of Narbo--an imprudent proceeding, to check which, and at the same
time to keep the just indignation of the multitude against
the consul within legal bounds, Pompeius temporarily reappeared
in Rome.(1)  When at the end of forty days the navigation had been
everywhere set free in the western basin of the Mediterranean,
Pompeius proceeded with sixty of his best vessels to the eastern
seas, and first of all to the original and main seat of piracy,
the Lycian and Cilician waters.  On the news of the approach
of the Roman fleet the piratical barks everywhere disappeared
from the open sea; and not only so, but even the strong Lycian fortresses
of Anticragus and Cragus surrendered without offering serious
resistance.  The well-calculated moderation of Pompeius helped
even more than fear to open the gates of these scarcely accessible
marine strongholds.  His predecessors had ordered every captured
freebooter to be nailed to the cross; without hesitation he gave
quarter to all, and treated in particular the common rowers found
in the captured piratical vessels with unusual indulgence.
The bold Cilician sea-kings alone ventured on an attempt to maintain
at least their own waters by arms against the Romans; after having
placed their children and wives and their rich treasures for
security in the mountain-fortresses of the Taurus, they awaited
the Roman fleet at the western frontier of Cilicia, in the offing
of Coracesium.  But here the ships of Pompeius, well manned and well
provided with all implements of war, achieved a complete victory.
Without farther hindrance he landed and began to storm and break up
the mountain-castles of the corsairs, while he continued to offer
to themselves freedom and life as the price of submission.  Soon
the great multitude desisted from the continuance of a hopeless war
in their strongholds and mountains, and consented to surrender.
Forty-nine days after Pompeius had appeared in the eastern seas,
Cilicia was subdued and the war at an end.

The rapid suppression of piracy was a great relief, but not a grand
achievement; with the resources of the Roman state, which had been
called forth in lavish measure, the corsairs could as little cope
as the combined gangs of thieves in a great city can cope
with a well-organized police.  It was a naive proceeding to celebrate
such a razzia as a victory.  But when compared with the prolonged
continuance and the vast and daily increasing extent of the evil,
it was natural that the surprisingly rapid subjugation
of the dreaded pirates should make a most powerful impression
on the public; and the more so, that this was the first trial of rule
centralized in a single hand, and the parties were eagerly waiting
to see whether that hand would understand the art of ruling better
than the collegiate body had done.  Nearly 400 ships and boats,
including 90 war vessels properly so called, were either taken
by Pompeius or surrendered to him; in all about 1300 piratical vessels
are said to have been destroyed; besides which the richly-filled
arsenals and magazines of the buccaneers were burnt.
Of the pirates about 10,000 perished; upwards of 20,000 fell alive
into the hands of the victor; while Publius Clodius the admiral
of the Roman army stationed in Cilicia, and a multitude of other
individuals carried off by the pirates, some of them long believed
at home to be dead, obtained once more their freedom through
Pompeius.  In the summer of 687, three months after the beginning
of the campaign, commerce resumed its wonted course and instead
of the former famine abundance prevailed in Italy.

Dissensions between Pompeius and Metellus as to Crete

A disagreeable interlude in the island of Crete, however,
disturbed in some measure this pleasing success of the Roman arms.
There Quintus Metellus was stationed in the second year of his command,
and was employed in finishing the subjugation-already substantially
effected--of the island,(2) when Pompeius appeared in the eastern
waters.  A collision was natural, for according to the Gabinian law
the command of Pompeius extended concurrently with that of Metellus
over the whole island, which stretched to a great length but was
nowhere more than ninety miles broad;(3) but Pompeius was considerate
enough not to assign it to any of his lieutenants.  The still resisting
Cretan communities, however, who had seen their subdued countrymen
taken to task by Metellus with the most cruel severity and had learned
on the other hand the gentle terms which Pompeius was in the habit
of imposing on the townships which surrendered to him in the south
of Asia Minor, preferred to give in their joint surrender to Pompeius.
He accepted it in Pamphylia, where he was just at the moment,
from their envoys, and sent along with them his legate Lucius Octavius
to announce to Metellus the conclusion of the conventions
and to take over the towns.  This proceeding was, no doubt,
not like that of a colleague; but formal right was wholly on the side
of Pompeius, and Metellus was most evidently in the wrong when,
utterly ignoring the convention of the cities with Pompeius,
he continued to treat them as hostile.  In vain Octavius protested;
in vain, as he had himself come without troops, he summoned
from Achaia Lucius Sisenna, the lieutenant of Pompeius stationed there;
Metellus, not troubling himself about either Octavius or Sisenna,
besieged Eleutherna and took Lappa by storm, where Octavius in person
was taken prisoner and ignominiously dismissed, while the Cretans
who were taken with him were consigned to the executioner.
Accordingly formal conflicts took place between the troops of Sisenna,
at whose head Octavius placed himself after that leader's
death, and those of Metellus; even when the former had been
commanded to return to Achaia, Octavius continued the war
in concert with the Cretan Aristion, and Hierapytna,
where both made a stand, was only subdued by Metellus
after the most obstinate resistance.

In reality the zealous Optimate Metellus had thus begun formal
civil war at his own hand against the generalissimo of the democracy.
It shows the indescribable disorganization in the Roman state,
that these incidents led to nothing farther than a bitter
correspondence between the two generals, who a couple of years
afterwards were sitting once more peacefully and even "amicably"
side by side in the senate.

Pompeius Takes the Supreme Command against Mithradates

Pompeius during these events remained in Cilicia; preparing
for the next year, as it seemed, a campaign against the Cretans
or rather against Metellus, in reality waiting for the signal
which should call him to interfere in the utterly confused affairs
of the mainland of Asia Minor.  The portion of the Lucullan army
that was still left after the losses which it had suffered
and the departure of the Fimbrian legions remained inactive
on the upper Halys in the country of the Trocmi bordering
on the Pontic territory.  Lucullus still held provisionally
the chief command, as his nominated successor Glabrio continued
to linger in the west of Asia Minor.  The three legions
commanded by Quintus Marcius Rex lay equally inactive
in Cilicia.  The Pontic territory was again wholly in the power
of king Mithradates, who made the individuals and communities
that had joined the Romans, such as the town of Eupatoria,
pay for their revolt with cruel severity.  The kings of the east
did not proceed to any serious offensive movement against the Romans,
either because it formed no part of their plan, or--as was asserted--
because the landing of Pompeius in Cilicia induced Mithradates
and Tigranes to desist from advancing farther.  The Manilian law
realized the secretly-cherished hopes of Pompeius more rapidly
than he probably himself anticipated; Glabrio and Rex
were recalled and the governorships of Pontus-Bithynia and Cilicia
with the troops stationed there, as well as the management
of the Pontic-Armenian war along with authority to make war, peace,
and alliance with the dynasts of the east at his own discretion,
were transferred to Pompeius.  Amidst the prospect of honours
and spoils so ample Pompeius was glad to forgo the chastising
of an ill-humoured Optimate who enviously guarded his scanty laurels;
he abandoned the expedition against Crete and the farther pursuit
of the corsairs, and destined his fleet also to support the attack
which he projected on the kings of Pontus and Armenia.  Yet amidst
this land-war he by no means wholly lost sight of piracy,
which was perpetually raising its head afresh.  Before he left Asia
(691) he caused the necessary ships to be fitted out there against
the corsairs; on his proposal in the following year a similar measure
was resolved on for Italy, and the sum needed for the purpose
was granted by the senate.  They continued to protect the coasts
with guards of cavalry and small squadrons, and though
as the expeditions to be mentioned afterwards against Cyprus in 696
and Egypt in 699 show, piracy was not thoroughly mastered, it yet
after the expedition of Pompeius amidst all the vicissitudes
and political crises of Rome could never again so raise its head
and so totally dislodge the Romans from the sea, as it had done
under the government of the mouldering oligarchy.

War Preparations of Pompeius
Alliance with the Parthians
Variance between Mithradates and Tigranes

The few months which still remained before the commencement
of the campaign in Asia Minor, were employed by the new commander-
in-chief with strenuous activity in diplomatic and military
preparations.  Envoys were sent to Mithradates, rather to reconnoitre
than to attempt a serious mediation.  There was a hope at the Pontic
court that Phraates king of the Parthians would be induced by the recent
considerable successes which the allies had achieved over Rome
to enter into the Pontic-Armenian alliance.  To counteract this, Roman
envoys proceeded to the court of Ctesiphon; and the internal troubles,
which distracted the Armenian ruling house, came to their aid.
A son of the great-king Tigranes, bearing the same name
had rebelled against his father, either because he was unwilling
to wait for the death of the old man, or because his father's
suspicion, which had already cost several of his brothers their
lives, led him to discern his only chance of safety in open
insurrection.  Vanquished by his father, he had taken refuge
with a number of Armenians of rank at the court of the Arsacid,
and intrigued against his father there.  It was partly due
to his exertions, that Phraates preferred to take the reward
which was offered to him by both sides for his accession--the secured
possession of Mesopotamia--from the hand of the Romans, renewed
with Pompeius the agreement concluded with Lucullus respecting
the boundary of the Euphrates,(4) and even consented to operate
in concert with the Romans against Armenia.  But the younger Tigranes
occasioned still greater mischief than that which arose out of his
promoting the alliance between the Romans and the Parthians,
for his insurrection produced a variance between the kings
Tigranes and Mithradates themselves.  The great-king cherished
in secret the suspicion that Mithradates might have had a hand
in the insurrection of his grandson--Cleopatra the mother
of the younger Tigranes was the daughter of Mithradates--
and, though no open rupture took place, the good understanding
between the two monarchs was disturbed at the very moment
when it was most urgently needed.

At the same time Pompeius prosecuted his warlike preparations
with energy.  The Asiatic allied and client communities were warned
to furnish the stipulated contingents.  Public notices summoned
the discharged veterans of the legions of Fimbria to return
to the standards as volunteers, and by great promises and the name
of Pompeius a considerable portion of them were induced in reality
to obey the call.  The whole force united under the orders
of Pompeius may have amounted, exclusive of the auxiliaries,
to between 40,000 and 50,000 men.(5)

Pompeius and Lucullus

In the spring of 688 Pompeius proceeded to Galatia, to take
the chief command of the troops of Lucullus and to advance
with them into the Pontic territory, whither the Cilician legions
were directed to follow.  At Danala, a place belonging to the Trocmi,
the two generals met; but the reconciliation, which mutual friends
had hoped to effect, was not accomplished.  The preliminary
courtesies soon passed into bitter discussions, and these
into violent altercation: they parted in worse mood than they had met.
As Lucullus continued to make honorary gifts and to distribute
lands just as if he were still in office, Pompeius declared
all the acts performed by his predecessor subsequent to
his own arrival null and void.  Formally he was in the right;
customary tactin the treatment of a meritorious and more than
sufficientlymortified opponent was not to be looked for from him.

Invasion of Pontus
Retreat of Mithradates

So soon as the season allowed, the Roman troops crossed
the frontier of Pontus.  There they were opposed by king Mithradates
with 30,000 infantry and 3000 cavalry.  Left in the lurch by his
allies and attacked by Rome with reinforced power and energy,
he made an attempt to procure peace; but he would hear nothing
of the unconditional submission which Pompeius demanded--what worse
could the most unsuccessful campaign bring to him? That he might
not expose his army, mostly archers and horsemen, to the formidable
shock of the Roman infantry of the line, he slowly retired before
the enemy, and compelled the Romans to follow him in his various
cross-marches; making a stand at the same time, wherever there was
opportunity, with his superior cavalry against that of the enemy,
and occasioning no small hardship to the Romans by impeding
their supplies.  At length Pompeius in his impatience desisted
from following the Pontic army, and, letting the king alone,
proceeded to subdue the land; he marched to the upper Euphrates,
crossed it, and entered the eastern provinces of the Pontic empire.
But Mithradates followed along the left bank of the Euphrates,
and when he had arrived in the Anaitic or Acilisenian province,
he intercepted the route of the Romans at the castle of Dasteira,
which was strong and well provided with water, and from which
with his light troops he commanded the plain.  Pompeius,
still wanting the Cilician legions and not strong enough to maintain
himself in this position without them, had to retire over the Euphrates
and to seek protection from the cavalry and archers of the king
in the wooded ground of Pontic Armenia extensively intersected
by rocky ravines and deep valleys.  It was not till the troops
from Cilicia arrived and rendered it possible to resume the offensive
with a superiority of force, that Pompeius again advanced, invested
the camp of the king with a chain of posts of almost eighteen miles
in length, and kept him formally blockaded there, while the Roman
detachments scoured the country far and wide.  The distress in the Pontic
camp was great; the draught animals even had to be killed; at length
after remaining for forty-five days the king caused his sick
and wounded, whom he could not save and was unwilling to leave
in the hands of the enemy, to be put to death by his own troops,
and departed during the night with the utmost secrecy towards
the east.  Cautiously Pompeius followed through the unknown land:
the march was now approaching the boundary which separated
the dominions of Mithradates and Tigranes.  When the Roman general
perceived that Mithradates intended not to bring the contest
to a decision within his own territory, but to draw the enemy away
after him into the far distant regions of the east, he determined
not to permit this.

Battle at Nicopolis

The two armies lay close to each other.  During the rest at noon
the Roman army set out without the enemy observing the movement,
made a circuit, and occupied the heights, which lay in front
and commanded a defile to be passed by the enemy, on the southern bank
of the river Lycus (Jeschil-Irmak) not far from the modern Enderes,
at the point where Nicopolis was afterwards built.  The following
morning the Pontic troops broke up in their usual manner,
and, supposing that the enemy was as hitherto behind them, after,
accomplishing the day's march they pitched their camp
in the very valley whose encircling heights the Romans had occupied.
Suddenly in the silence of the night there sounded all around them
the dreaded battle-cry of the legions, and missiles from all sides
poured on the Asiatic host, in which soldiers and camp-followers,
chariots, horses, and camels jostled each other; and amidst
the dense throng, notwithstanding the darkness, not a missile
failed to take effect.  When the Romans had expended their darts,
they charged down from the heights on the masses which had now become
visible by the light of the newly-risen moon, and which were
abandoned to them almost defenceless; those that did not fall
by the steel of the enemy were trodden down in the fearful pressure
under the hoofs and wheels.  It was the last battle-field
on which the gray-haired king fought with the Romans.  With three
attendants--two of his horsemen, and a concubine who was accustomed
to follow him in male attire and to fight bravely by his side--
he made his escape thence to the fortress of Sinoria, whither
a portion of his trusty followers found their way to him.  He divided
among them his treasures preserved there, 6000 talents of gold
(1,400,000 pounds); furnished them and himself with poison;
and hastened with the band that was left to him up the Euphrates
to unite with his ally, the great-king of Armenia.

Tigranes Breaks with Mithradates
Mithradates Crosses the Phasis

This hope likewise was vain; the alliance, on the faith of which
Mithradates took the route for Armenia, already by that time
existed no longer.  During the conflicts between Mithradates
and Pompeius just narrated, the king of the Parthians, yielding
to the urgency of the Romans and above all of the exiled Armenian prince,
had invaded the kingdom of Tigranes by force of arms, and had
compelled him to withdraw into the inaccessible mountains.
The invading army began even the siege of the capital Artaxata;
but, on its becoming protracted, king Phraates took his departure
with the greater portion of his troops; whereupon Tigranes overpowered
the Parthian corps left behind and the Armenian emigrants led
by his son, and re-established his dominion throughout the kingdom
Naturally, however, the king was under such circumstances little
inclined to fight with the freshly-victorious Romans, and least
of all to sacrifice himself for Mithradates; whom he trusted less
than ever, since information had reached him that his rebellious son
intended to betake himself to his grandfather.  So he entered into
negotiations with the Romans for a separate peace; but he did not wait
for the conclusion of the treaty to break off the alliance
which linked him to Mithradates.  The latter, when he had arrived
at the frontier of Armenia, was doomed to learn that the great-king
Tigranes had set a price of 100 talents (24,000 pounds)
on his head, had arrested his envoys, and had delivered them
to the Romans.  King Mithradates saw his kingdom in the hands
of the enemy, and his allies on the point of coming to an agreement
with them; it was not possible to continue the war; he might deem
himself fortunate, if he succeeded in effecting his escape along
the eastern and northern shores of the Black Sea, in perhaps
dislodging his son Machares--who had revolted and entered into
connection with the Romans(6)--once more from the Bosporan kingdom,
and in finding on the Maeotis a fresh soil for fresh projects.
So he turned northward.  When the king in his flight had crossed
the Phasis, the ancient boundary of Asia Minor, Pompeius for the time
discontinued his pursuit; but instead of returning to the region
of the sources of the Euphrates, he turned aside into the region
of the Araxes to settle matters with Tigranes.

Pompeius at Artaxata
Peace with Tigranes

Almost without meeting resistance he arrived in the region
of Artaxata (not far from Erivan) and pitched his camp thirteen miles
from the city.  There he was met by the son of the great-king,
who hoped after the fall of his father to receive the Armenian diadem
from the hand of the Romans, and therefore had endeavoured in every
way to prevent the conclusion of the treaty between his father
and the Romans.  The great-king was only the more resolved to purchase
peace at any price.  On horseback and without his purple robe,
but adorned with the royal diadem and the royal turban, he appeared
at the gate of the Roman camp and desired to be conducted
to the presence of the Roman general.  After having given up
at the bidding of the lictors, as the regulations of the Roman camp
required, his horse and his sword, he threw himself in barbarian
fashion at the feet of the proconsul and in token of unconditional
surrender placed the diadem and tiara in his hands.  Pompeius,
highly delighted at a victory which cost nothing, raised up
the humbled king of kings, invested him again with the insignia
of his dignity, and dictated the peace.  Besides a payment of;
1,400,000 pounds (6000 talents) to the war-chest and a present
to the soldiers, out of which each of them received 50 -denarii-
(2 pounds 2 shillings), the king ceded all the conquests which
he had made, not merely his Phoenician, Syrian, Cilician, and Cappadocian
possessions, but also Sophene and Corduene on the right bank
of the Euphrates; he was again restricted to Armenia proper,
and his position of great-king was, of course, at an end.
In a single campaign Pompeius had totally subdued the two mighty kings
of Pontus and Armenia.  At the beginning of 688 there was not a Roman
soldier beyond the frontier of the old Roman possessions; at its
close king Mithradates was wandering as an exile and without
an army in the ravines of the Caucasus, and king Tigranes sat
on the Armenian throne no longer as king of kings, but as a vassal
of Rome.  The whole domain of Asia Minor to the west of the Euphrates
unconditionally obeyed the Romans; the victorious army took up
its winter-quarters to the east of that stream on Armenian soil,
in the country from the upper Euphrates to the river Kur,
from which the Italians then for the first time watered their horses.

The Tribes of the Caucasus
Iberians
Albanians

But the new field, on which the Romans here set foot, raised up
for them new conflicts.  The brave peoples of the middle and eastern
Caucasus saw with indignation the remote Occidentals encamping
on their territory.  There--in the fertile and well-watered tableland
of the modern Georgia--dwelt the Iberians, a brave, well-organized,
agricultural nation, whose clan-cantons under their patriarchs
cultivated the soil according to the system of common possession,
without any separate ownership of the individual cultivators.  Army
and people were one; the people were headed partly by the ruler-
clans--out of which the eldest always presided over the whole
Iberian nation as king, and the next eldest as judge and leader
of the army--partly by special families of priests, on whom chiefly
devolved the duty of preserving a knowledge of the treaties
concluded with other peoples and of watching over their observance.
The mass of the non-freemen were regarded as serfs of the king.
Their eastern neighbours, the Albanians or Alans, who were settled
on the lower Kur as far as the Caspian Sea, were in a far lower
stage of culture.  Chiefly a pastoral people they tended, on foot
or on horseback, their numerous herds in the luxuriant meadows
of the modern Shirvan; their few tilled fields were still cultivated
with the old wooden plough without iron share.  Coined money
was unknown, and they did not count beyond a hundred.  Each of their
tribes, twenty-six in all, had its own chief and spoke its distinct
dialect.  Far superior in number to the Iberians, the Albanians
could not at all cope with them in bravery.  The mode of fighting
was on the whole the same with both nations; they fought chiefly
with arrows and light javelins, which they frequently after the Indian
fashion discharged from their lurking-places in the woods
behind the trunks of trees, or hurled down from the tops of trees
on the foe; the Albanians had also numerous horsemen partly mailed
after the Medo-Armenian manner with heavy cuirasses and greaves.
Both nations lived on their lands and pastures in a complete
independence preserved from time immemorial.  Nature itself
as it were, seems to have raised the Caucasus between Europe and Asia
as a rampart against the tide of national movements; there the arms
of Cyrus and of Alexander had formerly found their limit;
now the brave garrison of this partition-wall set themselves
to defend it also against the Romans.

Albanians Conquered by Pompeius
Iberians Conquered

Alarmed by the information that the Roman commander-in-chief
intended next spring to cross the mountains and to pursue
the Pontic king beyond the Caucasus--for Mithradates, they heard,
was passing the winter in Dioscurias (Iskuria between Suchum Kale
and Anaklia) on the Black Sea--the Albanians under their prince
Oroizes first crossed the Kur in the middle of the winter of 688-689
and threw themselves on the army, which was divided for the sake
of its supplies into three larger corps under Quintus Metellus Celer,
Lucius Flaccus, and Pompeius in person.  But Celer, on whom
the chief attack fell, made a brave stand, and Pompeius, after having
delivered himself from the division sent to attack him, pursued
the barbarians beaten at all points as far as the Kur.  Artoces
the king of the Iberians kept quiet and promised peace and friendship;
but Pompeius, informed that he was secretly arming so as to fall
upon the Romans on their march in the passes of the Caucasus,
advanced in the spring of 689, before resuming the pursuit
of Mithradates, to the two fortresses just two miles distant
from each other, Harmozica (Horum Ziche or Armazi) and Seusamora
(Tsumar) which a little above the modern Tiflis command the two valleys
of the river Kur and its tributary the Aragua, and with these
the only passes leading from Armenia to Iberia.  Artoces, surprised
by the enemy before he was aware of it, hastily burnt the bridge over
the Kur and retreated negotiating into the interior.  Pompeius occupied
the fortresses and followed the Iberians to the other bank
of the Kur; by which he hoped to induce them to immediate submission.
But Artoces retired farther and farther into the interior,
and, when at length he halted on the river Pelorus, he did so
not to surrender but to fight.  The Iberian archers however withstood
not for a moment the onset of the Roman legions, and, when Artoces
saw the Pelorus also crossed by the Romans, he submitted
at length to the conditions which the victor proposed, and sent
his children as hostages.

Pompeius Proceeds to Colchis

Pompeius now, agreeably to the plan which he had formerly projected,
marched through the Sarapana pass from the region of the Kur
to that of the Phasis and thence down that river to the Black Sea,
where on the Colchian coast the fleet under Servilius already
awaited him.  But it was for an uncertain idea, and an aim almost
unsubstantial, that the army and fleet were thus brought
to the richly fabled shores of Colchis.  The laborious march just
completed through unknown and mostly hostile nations was nothing
when compared with what still awaited them, and if they should
really succeed in conducting the force from the mouth of the Phasis
to the Crimea, through warlike and poor barbarian tribes,
on inhospitable and unknown waters, along a coast where
at certain places the mountains sink perpendicularly into the sea
and it would have been absolutely necessary to embark in the ships--
if such a march should be successfully accomplished, which was perhaps
more difficult than the campaigns of Alexander and Hannibal--
what was gained by it even at the best, corresponding at all to its toils
and dangers? The war doubtless was not ended, so long as the old
king was still among the living; but who could guarantee that they
would really succeed in catching the royal game for the sake of which
this unparalleled chase was to be instituted?  Was it not better
even at the risk of Mithradates once more throwing the torch
of war into Asia Minor, to desist from a pursuit which promised
so little gain and so many dangers? Doubtless numerous voices
in the army, and still more numerous voices in the capital,
urged the general to continue the pursuit incessantly and at any price;
but they were the voices partly of foolhardy Hotspurs,
partly of those perfidious friends, who would gladly at any price
have kept the too-powerful Imperator aloof from the capital
and entangled him amidst interminable undertakings in the east.
Pompeius was too experienced and too discreet an officer to stake
his fame and his army in obstinate adherence to so injudicious
an expedition; an insurrection of the Albanians in rear of the army
furnished the pretext for abandoning the further pursuit
of the king and arranging its return.  The fleet received instructions
to cruise in the Black Sea, to protect the northern coast of Asia
Minor against any hostile invasion, and strictly to blockade
the Cimmerian Bosporus under the threat of death to any trader
who should break the blockade.  Pompeius conducted the land troops
not without great hardships through the Colchian and Armenian territory
to the lower course of the Kur and onward, crossing the stream,
into the Albanian plain.

Fresh Conflicts with the Albanians

For several days the Roman army had to march in the glowing heat
through this almost waterless flat country, without encountering
the enemy; it was only on the left bank of the Abas (probably
the river elsewhere named Alazonius, now Alasan) that the force
of the Albanians under the leadership of Coses, brother of the king
Oroizes, was drawn up against the Romans; they are said to have
amounted, including the contingent which had arrived
from the inhabitants of the Transcaucasian steppes, to 60,000 infantry
and 12,000 cavalry.  Yet they would hardly have risked the battle,
unless they had supposed that they had merely to fight with
the Roman cavalry; but the cavalry had only been placed in front,
and, on its retiring, the masses of Roman infantry showed themselves
from their concealment behind.  After a short conflict the army
of the barbarians was driven into the woods, which Pompeius
gave orders to invest and set on fire.  The Albanians thereupon
consented to make peace; and, following the example of the more
powerful peoples, all the tribes settled between the Kur and the Caspian
concluded a treaty with the Roman general.  The Albanians,
Iberians, and generally the peoples settled to the south along,
and at the foot of, the Caucasus, thus entered at least for the moment
into a relation of dependence on Rome.  When, on the other hand,
the peoples between the Phasis and the Maeotis--Colchians, Soani,
Heniochi, Zygi, Achaeans, even the remote Bastarnae--were inscribed
in the long list of the nations subdued by Pompeius, the notion
of subjugation was evidently employed in a manner very far from exact.
The Caucasus once more verified its significance in the history
of the world; the Roman conquest, like the Persian and the Hellenic,
found its limit there.

Mithradates Goes to Panticapaeum

Accordingly king Mithradates was left to himself and to destiny.
As formerly his ancestor, the founder of the Pontic state
had first entered his future kingdom as a fugitive from the executioners
of Antigonus and attended only by six horsemen, so had the grandson
now been compelled once more to cross the bounds of his kingdom
and to turn his back on his own and his fathers' conquests.
But for no one had the dice of fate turned up the highest gains
and the greatest losses more frequently and more capriciously
than for the old sultan of Sinope; and the fortunes of men
change rapidly and incalculably in the east.  Well might
Mithradates now in the evening of his life accept each new
vicissitude with the thought that it too was only in its turn
paving the way for a fresh revolution, and that the only thing
constant was the perpetual change of fortune.  Inasmuch as
the Roman rule was intolerable for the Orientals at the very core
of their nature, and Mithradates himself was in good and in evil
a true prince of the east, amidst the laxity of the rule exercised
by the Roman senate over the provinces, and amidst the dissensions
of the political parties in Rome fermenting and ripening into civil
war, Mithradates might, if he was fortunate enough to bide
his time, doubtless re-establish his dominion yet a third time.
For this very reason--because he hoped and planned while still
there was life in him--he remained dangerous to the Romans so long as
he lived, as an aged refugee no less than when he had marched forth
with his hundred thousands to wrest Hellas and Macedonia
from the Romans.  The restless old man made his way in the year 689
from Dioscurias amidst unspeakable hardships partly by land partly
by sea to the kingdom of Panticapaeum, where by his reputation
and his numerous retainers he drove his renegade son Machares
from the throne and compelled him to put himself to death.
From this point he attempted once more to negotiate with the Romans;
he besought that his paternal kingdom might be restored to him,
and declared himself ready to recognize the supremacy of Rome
and to pay tribute as a vassal.  But Pompeius refused to grant
the king a position in which he would have begun the old game afresh,
and insisted on his personal submission.

His Last Preparations against Rome

Mithradates, however, had no thought of delivering himself into the hands
of the enemy, but was projecting new and still more extravagant plans.
Straining all the resources with which the treasures that he had saved
and the remnant of his states supplied him, he equipped a new army
of 36,000 men consisting partly of slaves which he armed and exercised
after the Roman fashion, and a war-fleet; according to rumour he designed
to march westward through Thrace, Macedonia, and Pannonia, to carry along
with him the Scythians in the Sarmatian steppes and the Celts on the Danube
as allies, and with this avalanche of peoples to throw himself
on Italy.  This has been deemed a grand idea, and the plan of war
of the Pontic king has been compared with the military march
of Hannibal; but the same project, which in a gifted man is a stroke
of genius, becomes folly in one who is wrong-headed.  This intended
invasion of Italy by the Orientals was simply ridiculous,
and nothing but a product of the impotent imagination of despair.
Through the prudent coolness of their leader the Romans
were prevented from Quixotically pursuing their Quixotic antagonist
and warding off in the distant Crimea an attack, which, if it
were not nipped of itself in the bud, would still have been
soon enough met at the foot of the Alps.

Revolt against Mithradates

In fact, while Pompeius, without troubling himself further
as to the threats of the impotent giant, was employed in organizing
the territory which he had gained, the destinies of the aged king
drew on to their fulfilment without Roman aid in the remote north.
His extravagant preparations had produced the most violent excitement
among the Bosporans, whose houses were torn down, and whose oxen
were taken from the plough and put to death, in order to procure
beams and sinews for constructing engines of war.  The soldiers
too were disinclined to enter on the hopeless Italian expedition.
Mithradates had constantly been surrounded by suspicion
and treason; he had not the gift of calling forth affection
and fidelity among those around him.  As in earlier years he had
compelled his distinguished general Archelaus to seek protection
in the Roman camp; as during the campaigns of Lucullus his most
trusted officers Diodes, Phoenix, and even the most notable of the Roman
emigrants had passed over to the enemy; so now, when his star
grew pale and the old, infirm, embittered sultan was accessible
to no one else save his eunuchs, desertion followed still more rapidly
on desertion.  Castor, the commandant of the fortress Phanagoria
(on the Asiatic coast opposite Kertch), first raised the standard
of revolt; he proclaimed the freedom of the town and delivered
the sons of Mithradates that were in the fortress into the hands
of the Romans.  While the insurrection spread among the Bosporan towns,
and Chersonesus (not far from Sebastopol), Theudosia (Kaffa),
and others joined the Phanagorites, the king allowed his suspicion
and his cruelty to have free course.  On the information of despicable
eunuchs his most confidential adherents were nailed to the cross;
the king's own sons were the least sure of their lives.  The son
who was his father's favourite and was probably destined by him
as his successor, Pharnaces, took his resolution and headed
the insurgents.  The servants whom Mithradates sent to arrest him,
and the troops despatched against him, passed over to his side;
the corps of Italian deserters, perhaps the most efficient among
the divisions of Mithradates' army, and for that very reason the least
inclined to share in the romantic--and for the deserters peculiarly
hazardous--expedition against Italy, declared itself en masse
for the prince; the other divisions of the army and the fleet followed
the example thus set.

Death of Mithadates

After the country and the army had abandoned the king, the capital
Panticapaeum at length opened its gates to the insurgents
and delivered over to them the old king enclosed in his palace.
From the high wall of his castle the latter besought his son at least
to grant him life and not imbrue his hands in his father's blood;
but the request came ill from the lips of a man whose own hands
were stained with the blood of his mother and with the recently-shed
blood of his innocent son Xiphares; and in heartless severity
and inhumanity Pharnaces even outstripped his father.  Seeing therefore
he had now to die, the sultan resolved at least to die as he had
lived; his wives, his concubines and his daughters, including
the youthful brides of the kings of Egypt and Cyprus, had all to suffer
the bitterness of death and drain the poisoned cup, before he too
took it, and then, when the draught did not take effect quickly
enough, presented his neck for the fatal stroke to a Celtic
mercenary Betuitus.  So died in 691 Mithradates Eupator,
in the sixty-eighth year of his life and the fifty-seventh of his reign,
twenty-six years after he had for the first time taken the field
against the Romans.  The dead body, which king Pharnaces sent
as a voucher of his merits and of his loyalty to Pompeius, was by order
of the latter laid in the royal sepulchre of Sinope.

The death of Mithradates was looked on by the Romans as equivalent
to a victory: the messengers who reported to the general
the catastrophe appeared crowned with laurel, as if they had a victory
to announce, in the Roman camp before Jericho.  In him a great
enemy was borne to the tomb, a greater than had ever yet withstood
the Romans in the indolent east.  Instinctively the multitude felt
this: as formerly Scipio had triumphed even more over Hannibal than
over Carthage, so the conquest of the numerous tribes of the east
and of the great-king himself was almost forgotten in the death
of Mithradates; and at the solemn entry of Pompeius nothing attracted
more the eyes of the multitude than the pictures, in which they saw
king Mithradates as a fugitive leading his horse by the rein
and thereafter sinking down in death between the dead bodies of his
daughters.  Whatever judgment may be formed as to the idiosyncrasy
of the king, he is a figure of great significance--in the full
sense of the expression--for the history of the world. He was not
a personage of genius, probably not even of rich endowments;
but he possessed the very respectable gift of hating,
and out of this hatred he sustained an unequal conflict
against superior foes throughout half a century, without success
doubtless, but with honour.  He became still more significant
through the position in which history had placed him
thanthrough his individual character.  As the forerunner
of the national reaction of the Orientals against the Occidentals,
he opened the new conflict of the east against the west;
and the feeling remained with the vanquished as with the victors,
that his death was not so much the end as the beginning.

Pompeius Proceeds to Syria

Meanwhile Pompeius, after his warfare in 689 with the peoples
of the Caucasus, had returned to the kingdom of Pontus,
and there reduced the last castles still offering resistance;
these were razed in order to check the evils of brigandage,
and the castle wells were rendered unserviceable by rolling blocks
of rock into them.  Thence he set out in the summer of 690 for Syria,
to regulate its affairs.

State of Syria

It is difficult to present a clear view of the state of disorganization
which then prevailed in the Syrian provinces.  It is true
that in consequence of the attacks of Lucullus the Armenian governor
Magadates had evacuated these provinces in 685,(7) and that the Ptolemies,
gladly as they would have renewed the attempts of their predecessors
to attach the Syrian coast to their kingdom, were yet afraid to provoke
the Roman government by the occupation of Syria; the more so,
as that government had not yet regulated their more than doubtful
legal title even in the case of Egypt, and had been several times
solicited by the Syrian princes to recognize them as the legitimate heirs
of the extinct house of the Lagids.  But, though the greater powers
all at the moment refrained from interference in the affairs
of Syria, the land suffered far more than it would have suffered amidst
a great war, through the endless and aimless feuds of the princes,
knights, and cities.

Arabian Princes

The actual masters in the Seleucid kingdom were at this time
the Bedouins, the Jews, and the Nabataeans.  The inhospitable
sandy steppe destitute of springs and trees, which, stretching
from the Arabianpeninsula up to and beyond the Euphrates, reaches
towards the west as far as the Syrian mountain-chain and its narrow belt
of coast, toward the east as far as the rich lowlands of the Tigris
and lower Euphrates--this Asiatic Sahara--was the primitive home
of the sons of Ishmael; from the commencement of tradition we find
the "Bedawi," the "son of the desert," pitching his tents there
and pasturing his camels, or mounting his swift horse in pursuit
now of the foe of his tribe, now of the travelling merchant.  Favoured
formerly by king Tigranes, who made use of them for his plans half
commercial half political,(8) and subsequently by the total absence
of any master in the Syrian land, these children of the desert
spread themselves over northern Syria.  Wellnigh the leading part
in a political point of view was enacted by those tribes,
which had appropriated the first rudiments of a settled existence
from the vicinity of the civilized Syrians.  The most noted
of these emirs were Abgarus, chief of the Arab tribe of the Mardani,
whom Tigranes had settled about Edessa and Carrhae in upper Mesopotamia;(9)
then to the west of the Euphrates Sampsiceramus, emir of the Arabs
of Hemesa (Homs) between Damascus and Antioch, and master
of the strong fortress Arethusa; Azizus the head of another horde
roaming in the same region; Alchaudonius, the prince of the Rhambaeans,
who had already put himself into communication with Lucullus;
and several others.

Robber-Chiefs

Alongside of these Bedouin princes there had everywhere appeared
bold cavaliers, who equalled or excelled the children of the desert
in the noble trade of waylaying.  Such was Ptolemaeus son
of Mennaeus, perhaps the most powerful among these Syrian robber-
chiefs and one of the richest men of this period, who ruled over
the territory of the Ityraeans--the modern Druses--in the valleys
of the Libanus as well as on the coast and over the plain
of Massyas to the northward with the cities of Heliopolis (Baalbec)
and Chalcis, and maintained 8000 horsemen at his own expense;
such were Dionysius and Cinyras, the masters of the maritime cities
Tripolis (Tarablus) and Byblus (between Tarablus and Beyrout);
such was the Jew Silas in Lysias, a fortress not far from Apamea
on the Orontes.

Jews

In the south of Syria, on the other hand, the race of the Jews
seemed as though it would about this time consolidate itself
into a political power.  Through the devout and bold defence
of the primitive Jewish national worship, which was imperilled
by the levelling Hellenism of the Syrian kings, the family
of the Hasmonaeans or the Makkabi had not only attained to their
hereditary principality and gradually to kingly honours;(10)
but these princely high-priests had also spread their conquests
to the north, east, and south.  When the brave Jannaeus Alexander
died (675), the Jewish kingdom stretched towards the south over
the whole Philistian territory as far as the frontier of Egypt, towards
the south-east as far as that of the Nabataean kingdom of Petra,
from which Jannaeus had wrested considerable tracts on the right
bank of the Jordan and the Dead Sea, towards the north over Samaria
and Decapolis up to the lake of Gennesareth; here he was already
making arrangements to occupy Ptolemais (Acco) and victoriously
to repel the aggressions of the Ityraeans.  The coast obeyed the Jews
from Mount Carmel as far as Rhinocorura, including the important
Gaza--Ascalon alone was still free; so that the territory
of the Jews, once almost cut off from the sea, could now be enumerated
among the asylums of piracy.  Now that the Armenian invasion, just
as it approached the borders of Judaea, was averted from that land
by the intervention of Lucullus,(11) the gifted rulers
of the Hasmonaean house would probably have carried their arms still
farther, had not the development of the power of that remarkable
conquering priestly state been nipped in the bud by internal divisions.

Pharisees
Sadducees

The spirit of religious independence, and the spirit of national
independence--the energetic union of which had called the Maccabee
state into life--speedily became once more dissociated and even
antagonistic.  The Jewish orthodoxy or Pharisaism, as it was called,
was content with the free exercise of religion, as it had
been asserted in defiance of the Syrian rulers; its practical aim
was a community of Jews, composed of the orthodox in the lands
of all rulers, essentially irrespective of the secular government--
a community which found its visible points of union in the tribute
for the temple at Jerusalem, which was obligatory on every
conscientious Jew, and in the schools of religion and spiritual
courts.  Overagainst this orthodoxy, which turned away
from political life and became more and more stiffened into theological
formalism and painful ceremonial service, were arrayed
the defenders of the national independence, invigorated amidst
successful struggles against foreign rule, and advancing towards
the ideal of a restoration of the Jewish state, the representatives
of the old great families--the so-called Sadducees--partly
on dogmatic grounds, in so far as they acknowledged only the sacred
books themselves and conceded authority merely, not canonicity,
to the "bequests of the scribes," that is, to canonical tradition;(12)
partly and especially on political grounds, in so far as, instead
of a fatalistic waiting for the strong arm of the Lord of Zebaoth,
they taught that the salvation of the nation was to be expected
from the weapons of this world, and from the inward and outward
strengthening of the kingdom of David as re-established
in the glorious times of the Maccabees.  Those partisans of orthodoxy
found their support in the priesthood and the multitude; they
contested with the Hasmonaeans the legitimacy of their high-
priesthood, and fought against the noxious heretics with all
the reckless implacability, with which the pious are often found
to contend for the possession of earthly goods.  The state-party
on the other hand relied for support on intelligence brought into
contact with the influences of Hellenism, on the army, in which
numerous Pisidian and Cilician mercenaries served, and on the abler
kings, who here strove with the ecclesiastical power much as
a thousand years later the Hohenstaufen strove with the Papacy.
Jannaeus had kept down the priesthood with a strong hand;
under his two sons there arose (685 et seq.) a civil and fraternal war,
since the Pharisees opposed the vigorous Aristobulus and attempted
to obtain their objects under the nominal rule of his brother,
the good-natured and indolent Hyrcanus.  This dissension not merely
put a stop to the Jewish conquests, but gave also foreign nations
opportunity to interfere and thereby obtain a commanding position
in southern Syria.

Nabataeans

This was the case first of all with the Nabataeans.  This remarkable
nation has often been confounded with its eastern neighbours,
the wandering Arabs, but it is more closely related to the Aramaean
branch than to the proper children of Ishmael.  This Aramaean or,
according to the designation of the Occidentals, Syrian stock
must have in very early times sent forth from its most ancient
settlements about Babylon a colony, probably for the sake of trade,
to the northern end of the Arabian gulf; these were the Nabataeans
on the Sinaitic peninsula, between the gulf of Suez and Aila,
and in the region of Petra (Wadi Mousa).  In their ports
the wares of the Mediterranean were exchanged for those of India;
the great southern caravan-route, which ran from Gaza to the mouth
of the Euphrates and the Persian gulf, passed through the capital
of the Nabataeans--Petra--whose still magnificent rock-palaces
and rock-tombs furnish clearer evidence of the Nabataean civilization
than does an almost extinct tradition.  The leaders of the Pharisees,
to whom after the manner of priests the victory of their faction
seemed not too dearly bought at the price of the independence
and integrity of their country, solicited Aretas the king
of the Nabataeans for aid against Aristobulus, in return for which
they promised to give back to him all the conquests wrested
from him by Jannaeus.  Thereupon Aretas had advanced with, it was
said, 50,000 men into Judaea and, reinforced by the adherents
of the Pharisees, he kept king Aristobulus besieged in his capital.

Syrian Cities

Amidst the system of violence and feud which thus prevailed
from one end of Syria to another, the larger cities were of course
the principal sufferers, such as Antioch, Seleucia, Damascus,
whose citizens found themselves paralysed in their husbandry
as well as in their maritime and caravan trade.  The citizens of Byblus
and Berytus (Beyrout) were unable to protect their fields
and their ships from the Ityraeans, who issuing from their mountain
and maritime strongholds rendered land and sea equally insecure.
Those of Damascus sought to ward off the attacks of the Ityraeans
and Ptolemaeus by handing themselves over to the more remote kings
of the Nabataeans or of the Jews.  In Antioch Sampsiceramus and Azizus
mingled in the internal feuds of the citizens, and the Hellenic
great city had wellnigh become even now the seat of an Arab emir.
The state of things reminds us of the kingless times of the German
middle ages, when Nuremberg and Augsburg found their protection
not in the king's law and the king's courts, but in their own walls
alone; impatiently the merchant-citizens of Syria awaited the strong
arm, which should restore to them peace and security of intercourse.

The Last Seleucids

There was no want, however, of a legitimate king in Syria;
there were even two or three of them.  A prince Antiochus
from the house of the Seleucids had been appointed by Lucullus
as ruler of the most northerly province in Syria, Commagene.(13)
Antiochus Asiaticus, whose claims on the Syrian throne had met
with recognition both from the senate and from Lucullus,(14)
had been received in Antioch after the retreat of the Armenians
and there acknowledged as king.  A third Seleucid prince Philippus
had immediately confronted him there as a rival; and the great
population of Antioch, excitable and delighting in opposition
almost like that of Alexandria, as well as one or two
of the neighbouring Arab emirs had interfered in the family strife
which now seemed inseparable from the rule of the Seleucids.
Was there any wonder that legitimacy became ridiculous and loathsome
to its subjects, and that the so-called rightful kings
were of even somewhat less importance in the land than the petty
princes and robber-chiefs?

Annexation of Syria

To create order amidst this chaos did not require either brilliance
of conception or a mighty display of force, but it required a clear
insight into the interests of Rome and of her subjects, and vigour
and consistency in establishing and maintaining the institutions
recognized as necessary.  The policy of the senate in support
of legitimacy had sufficiently degraded itself; the general,
whom the opposition had brought into power, was not to be guided
by dynastic considerations, but had only to see that the Syrian kingdom
should not be withdrawn from the clientship of Rome in future either
by the quarrels of pretenders or by the Covetousness of neighbours.
But to secure this end there was only one course; that the Roman
community should send a satrap to grasp with a vigorous hand
the reins of government, which had long since practically slipped
from the hands of the kings of the ruling house more even through
their own fault than through outward misfortunes.  This course Pompeius
took.  Antiochus the Asiatic, on requesting to be acknowledged
as the hereditary ruler of Syria, received the answer that Pompeius
would not give back the sovereignty to a king who knew neither how
to maintain nor how to govern his kingdom, even at the request
of his subjects, much less against their distinctly expressed wishes.
With this letter of the Roman proconsul the house of Seleucus
was ejected from the throne which it had occupied for two hundred
and fifty years.  Antiochus soon after lost his life through
the artifice of the emir Sampsiceramus, as whose client he played
the ruler in Antioch; thenceforth there is no further mention of these
mock-kings and their pretensions.

Military Pacification of Syria

But, to establish the new Roman government and introduce
any tolerable order into the confusion of affairs, it was further
necessary to advance into Syria with a military force and to terrify
or subdue all the disturbers of the peace, who had sprung
up during the many years of anarchy, by means of the Roman legions.
Already during the campaigns in the kingdom of Pontus and on the Caucasus
Pompeius had turned his attention to the affairs of Syria
and directed detached commissioners and corps to interfere,
where there was need.  Aulus Gabinius--the same who as tribune
of the people had sent Pompeius to the east--had in 689 marched
along the Tigris and then across Mesopotamia to Syria, to adjust
the complicated affairs of Judaea.  In like manner the severely pressed
Damascus had already been occupied by Lollius and Metellus.  Soon
afterwards another adjutant of Pompeius, Marcus Scaurus, arrived
in Judaea, to allay the feuds ever breaking out afresh there.
Lucius Afranius also, who during the expedition of Pompeius
to the Caucasus held the command of the Roman troops in Armenia,
had proceeded from Corduene (the northern Kurdistan) to upper
Mesopotamia, and, after he had successfully accomplished
the perilous march through the desert with the sympathizing help
of the Hellenes settled in Carrhae, brought the Arabs in Osrhoene
to submission.  Towards the end of 690 Pompeius in person arrived
in Syria,(15) and remained there till the summer of the following
year, resolutely interfering and regulating matters for the present
and the future.  He sought to restore the kingdom to its state
in the better times of the Seleucid rule; all usurped powers were set
aside, the robber-chiefs were summoned to give up their castles,
the Arab sheiks were again restricted to their desert domains,
the affairs of the several communities were definitely regulated.

The Robber-Chiefs Chastised

The legions stood ready to procure obedience to these stern orders,
and their interference proved especially necessary against
the audacious robber-chiefs.  Silas the ruler of Lysias, Dionysius
the ruler of Tripolis, Cinyras the ruler of Byblus were taken prisoners
in their fortresses and executed, the mountain and maritime strongholds
of the Ityraeans were broken up, Ptolemaeus son of Mennaeus in Chalcis
was forced to purchase his freedom and his lordship with a ransom
of 1000 talents (240,000 pounds).  Elsewhere the commands
of the new master met for the most part with unresisting obedience.

Negotiations and Conflicts with the Jews

The Jews alone hesitated.  The mediators formerly sent by Pompeius,
Gabinius and Scaurus, had--both, as it was said, bribed
with considerable sums--in the dispute between the brothers
Hyrcanus and Aristobulus decided in favour of the latter, and had also
induced king Aretas to raise the siege of Jerusalem and to proceed
homeward, in doing which he sustained a defeat at the hands
of Aristobulus.  But, when Pompeius arrived in Syria, he cancelled
the orders of his subordinates and directed the Jews to resume their
old constitution under high-priests, as the senate had recognized
it about 593,(16) and to renounce along with the hereditary
principality itself all the conquests made by the Hasmonaean
princes.  It was the Pharisees, who had sent an embassy of two
hundred of their most respected men to the Roman general and procured
from him the overthrow of the kingdom; not to the advantage
of their own nation, but doubtless to that of the Romans,
who from the nature of the case could not but here revert
to the old rights of the Seleucids, and could not tolerate a conquering
power like that of Jannaeus within the limits of their empire.
Aristobulus was uncertain whether it was better patiently
to acquiesce in his inevitable doom or to meet his fate with arms
in hand; at one time he seemed on the point of submitting to Pompeius,
at another he seemed as though he would summon the national party
among the Jews to a struggle with the Romans.  When at length,
with the legions already at the gates, he yielded to the enemy,
the more resolute or more fanatical portion of his army refused
to comply with the orders of a king who was not free.  The capital
submitted; the steep temple-rock was defended by that fanatical band
for three months with an obstinacy ready to brave death, till at last
the besiegers effected an entrance while the besieged were resting
on the Sabbath, possessed themselves of the sanctuary, and handed over
the authors of that desperate resistance, so far as they had
not fallen under the sword of the Romans, to the axes of the lictors.
Thus ended the last resistance of the territories newly annexed
to the Roman state.

The New Relations of the Romans in the East

The work begun by Lucullus had been completed by Pompeius;
the hitherto formally independent states of Bithynia, Pontus,
and Syria were united with the Roman state; the exchange--which
had been recognized for more than a hundred years as necessary--
of the feeble system of a protectorate for that of direct sovereignty
over the more important dependent territories,(17) had at length
been realized, as soon as the senate had been overthrown and the Gracchan
party had come to the helm.  Rome had obtained in the east
new frontiers, new neighbours, new friendly and hostile relations.
There were now added to the indirect territories of Rome
the kingdom of Armenia and the principalities of the Caucasus,
and also the kingdom on the Cimmerian Bosporus, the small remnant
of the extensive conquests of Mithradates Eupator, now a client-state
of Rome under the government of his son and murderer Pharnaces;
the town of Phanagoria alone, whose commandant Castor had given
the signal for the revolt, was on that account recognized by the Romans
as free and independent.

Conflicts with the Nabataeans

No like successes could be boasted of against the Nabataeans.
King Aretas had indeed, yielding to the desire of the Romans,
evacuated Judaea; but Damascus was still in his hands,
and the Nabataean land had not yet been trodden by any Roman soldier.
To subdue that region or at least to show to their new neighbours
in Arabia that the Roman eagles were now dominant on the Orontes
and on the Jordan, and that the time had gone by when any one was free
to levy contributions in the Syrian lands as a domain without a master,
Pompeius began in 691 an expedition against Petra; but detained
by the revolt of the Jews, which broke out during this expedition,
he was not reluctant to leave to his successor Marcus Scaurus
the carrying out of the difficult enterprise against the Nabataean city
situated far off amidst the desert.(18)  In reality Scaurus also
soon found himself compelled to return without having accomplished
his object.  He had to content himself with making war
on the Nabataeans in the deserts on the left bank of the Jordan,
where he could lean for support on the Jews, but yet bore off only
very trifling successes.  Ultimately the adroit Jewish minister
Antipater from Idumaea persuaded Aretas to purchase a guarantee
for all his possessions, Damascus included, from the Roman governor
for a sum of money; and this is the peace celebrated on the coins
of Scaurus, where king Aretas appears--leading his camel--
as a suppliant offering the olive branch to the Roman.

Difficulty with the Parthians

Far more fraught with momentous effects than these new relations
of the Romans to the Armenians, Iberians, Bosporans, and Nabataeans
was the proximity into which through the occupation of Syria they
were brought with the Parthian state.  Complaisant as had been
the demeanour of Roman diplomacy towards Phraates while the Pontic
and Armenian states still subsisted, willingly as both Lucullus
and Pompeius had then conceded to him the possession of the regions
beyond the Euphrates,(19) the new neighbour now sternly took up
his position by the side of the Arsacids; and Phraates, if the royal
art of forgetting his own faults allowed him, might well recall now
the warning words of Mithradates that the Parthian by his alliance
with the Occidentals against the kingdoms of kindred race paved
the way first for their destruction and then for his own.
Romans and Parthians in league had brought Armenia to ruin;
when it was overthrown, Rome true to her old policy now reversed
the parts and favoured the humbled foe at the expense
of the powerful ally.  The singular preference, which the father
Tigranes experienced from Pompeius as contrasted with his son
the ally and son-in-law of the Parthian king, was already
part of this policy; it was a direct offence, when soon afterwards
by the orders of Pompeius the younger Tigranes and his family
were arrested and were not released even on Phraates interceding
with the friendly general for his daughter and his son-in-law.
But Pompeius paused not here.  The province of Corduene,
to which both Phraates and Tigranes laid claim, was at the command
of Pompeius occupied by Roman troops for the latter, and the Parthians
who were found in possession were driven beyond the frontier
and pursued even as far as Arbela in Adiabene, without the government
of Ctesiphon having even been previously heard (689).
Far the most suspicious circumstance however was, that the Romans
seemed not at all inclined to respect the boundary of the Euphrates
fixed by treaty.  On several occasions Roman divisions
destined from Armenia for Syria marched across Mesopotamia;
the Arab emir Abgarus of Osrhoene was received under singularly
favourable conditions into Roman protection; nay, Oruros, situated
in Upper Mesopotamia somewhere between Nisibis and the Tigris 220
miles eastward from the Commagenian passage of the Euphrates,
was designated as the eastern limit of the Roman dominion--
presumably their indirect dominion, inasmuch as the larger
and more fertile northern half of Mesopotamia had been assigned
by the Romans in like manner with Corduene to the Armenian empire.
The boundary between Romans and Parthians thus became the great
Syro-Mesopotamian desert instead of the Euphrates; and this too
seemed only provisional.  To the Parthian envoys, who came to insist
on the maintenance of the agreements--which certainly, as it would
seem, were only concluded orally--respecting the Euphrates
boundary, Pompeius gave the ambiguous reply that the territory
of Rome extended as far as her rights.  The remarkable intercourse
between the Roman commander-in-chief and the Parthian satraps
of the region of Media and even of the distant province Elymais
(between Susiana, Media, and Persia, in the modern Luristan) seemed
a commentary on this speech.(20)  The viceroys of this latter
mountainous, warlike, and remote land had always exerted themselves
to acquire a position independent of the great-king; it was
the more offensive and menacing to the Parthian government,
when Pompeius accepted the proffered homage of this dynast.
Not less significant was the fact that the title of "king of kings,"
which had been hitherto conceded to the Parthian king by the Romans
in official intercourse, was now all at once exchanged by them
for the simple title of king.  This was even more a threat than
a violation of etiquette.  Since Rome had entered on the heritage
of the Seleucids, it seemed almost as if the Romans had a mind to revert
at a convenient moment to those old times, when all Iran and Turan
were ruled from Antioch, and there was as yet no Parthian empire
but merely a Parthian satrapy.  The court of Ctesiphon would thus
have had reason enough for going to war with Rome; it seemed
the prelude to its doing so, when in 690 it declared war on Armenia
on account of the question of the frontier.  But Phraates had not
the courage to come to an open rupture with the Romans at a time
when the dreaded general with his strong army was on the borders
of the Parthian empire.  When Pompeius sent commissioners to settle
amicably the dispute between Parthia and Armenia, Phraates yielded
to the Roman mediation forced upon him and acquiesced in their
award, which assigned to the Armenians Corduene and northern
Mesopotamia.  Soon afterwards his daughter with her son and her
husband adorned the triumph of the Roman general.  Even the Parthians
trembled before the superior power of Rome; and, if they had not,
like the inhabitants of Pontus and Armenia, succumbed to the Roman
arms, the reason seemed only to be that they had not ventured
to stand the conflict.

Organization of the Provinces

There still devolved on the general the duty of regulating
the internal relations of the newly-acquired provinces and of removing
as far as possible the traces of a thirteen years' desolating war.
The work of organization begun in Asia Minor by Lucullus
and the commission associated with him, and in Crete by Metellus,
received its final conclusion from Pompeius.  The former province
of Asia, which embraced Mysia, Lydia, Phrygia, and Caria, was converted
from a frontier province into a central one.  The newly-erected
provinces were, that of Bithynia and Pontus, which was formed
out of the whole former kingdom of Nicomedes and the western half
of the former Pontic state as far as and beyond the Halys;
that of Cilicia, which indeed was older, but was now for the first
time enlarged and organized in a manner befitting its name,
and comprehended also Pamphylia and Isauria; that of Syria,
and that of Crete.  Much was no doubt wanting to render that mass
of countries capable of being regarded as the territorial possession
of Rome in the modern sense of the term.  The form and order
of the government remained substantially as they were; only the Roman
community came in place of the former monarchs.  Those Asiatic provinces
consisted as formerly of a motley mixture of domanial possessions,
urban territories de facto or de jure autonomous, lordships pertaining
to princes and priests, and kingdoms, all of which were as regards
internal administration more or less left to themselves,
and in other respects were dependent, sometimes in milder sometimes
in stricter forms, on the Roman government and its proconsuls
very much as formerly on the great-king and his satraps.

Feudatory Kings
Cappadocia
Commagene
Galatia

The first place, in rank at least, among the dependent dynasts
was held by the king of Cappadocia, whose territory Lucullus had
already enlarged by investing him with the province of Melitene
(about Malatia) as far as the Euphrates, and to whom Pompeius
farther granted on the western frontier some districts taken off
Cilicia from Castabala as far as Derbe near Iconium, and on the eastern
frontier the province of Sophene situated on the left bank
of the Euphrates opposite Melitene and at first destined
for the Armenian prince Tigranes; so that the most important passage
of the Euphrates thus came wholly into the power of the Cappadocian
prince.  The small province of Commagene between Syria
and Cappadocia with its capital Samosata (Samsat) remained a dependent
kingdom in the hands of the already-named Seleucid Antiochus;(21)
to him too were assigned the important fortress of Seleucia (near
Biradjik) commanding the more southern passage of the Euphrates,
and the adjoining tracts on the left bank of that river; and thus
care was taken that the two chief passages of the Euphrates
with a corresponding territory on the eastern bank were left in the hands
of two dynasts wholly dependent on Rome.  Alongside of the kings
of Cappadocia and Commagene, and in real power far superior to them,
the new king Deiotarus ruled in Asia Minor.  One of the tetrarchs
of the Celtic stock of the Tolistobogii settled round Pessinus,
and summoned by Lucullus and Pompeius to render military service
with the other small Roman clients, Deiotarus had in these campaigns
so brilliantly proved his trustworthiness and his energy as contrasted
with all the indolent Orientals that the Roman generals conferred
upon him, in addition to his Galatian heritage and his possessions
in the rich country between Amisus and the mouth of the Halys,
the eastern half of the former Pontic empire with the maritime towns
of Pharnacia and Trapezus and the Pontic Armenia as far as
the frontier of Colchis and the Greater Armenia, to form the kingdom
of Lesser Armenia.  Soon afterwards he increased his already
considerable territory by the country of the Celtic Trocmi,
whose tetrarch he dispossessed.  Thus the petty feudatory became
one of the most powerful dynasts of Asia Minor, to whom might
be entrusted the guardianship of an important part of the frontier
of the empire.

Princes and Chiefs

Vassals of lesser importance were, the other numerous Galatian
tetrarchs, one of whom, Bogodiatarus prince of the Trocmi,
was on account of his tried valour in the Mithradatic war presented
by Pompeius with the formerly Pontic frontier-town of Mithradatium;
Attalus prince of Paphlagonia, who traced back his lineage
to the old ruling house of the Pylaemenids; Aristarchus and other petty
lords in the Colchian territory; Tarcondimotus who ruled in eastern
Cilicia in the mountain-valleys of the Amanus; Ptolemaeus son
of Mennaeus who continued to rule in Chalcis on the Libanus; Aretas
king of the Nabataeans as lord of Damascus; lastly, the Arabic
emirs in the countries on either side of the Euphrates, Abgarus
in Osrhoene, whom the Romans endeavoured in every way to draw over
to their interest with the view of using him as an advanced post
against the Parthians, Sampsiceramus in Hemesa, Alchaudonius
the Rhambaean, and another emir in Bostra.

Priestly Princes

To these fell to be added the spiritual lords who in the east
frequently ruled over land and people like secular dynasts,
and whose authority firmly established in that native home
of fanaticism the Romans prudently refrained from disturbing,
as they refrained from even robbing the temples of their treasures:
the high-priest of the Goddess Mother in Pessinus; the two high-priests
of the goddess Ma in the Cappadocian Comana (on the upper Sarus)
and in the Pontic city of the same name (Gumenek near Tocat),
both lords who were in their countries inferior only to the king
in power, and each of whom even at a much later period possessed
extensive estates with special jurisdiction and about six thousand
temple-slaves--Archelaus, son of the general of that name
who passed over from Mithradates to the Romans, was invested
by Pompeius with the Pontic high-priesthood--the high-priest
of the Venasian Zeus in the Cappadocian district of Morimene,
whose revenues amounted annually to 3600 pounds (15 talents);
the "archpriest and lord" of that territory in Cilicia Trachea,
where Teucer the son of Ajax had founded a temple to Zeus, over which
his descendants presided by virtue of hereditary right; the "arch-priest
and lord of the people" of the Jews, to whom Pompeius, after having
razed the walls of the capital and the royal treasuries and strongholds
in the land, gave back the presidency of the nation with a serious
admonition to keep the peace and no longer to aim at conquests.

Urban Communities

Alongside of these secular and spiritual potentates stood the urban
communities.  These were partly associated into larger unions
which rejoiced in a comparative independence, such as in particular
the league of the twenty-three Lycian cities, which was well organized
and constantly, for instance, kept aloof from participation
in the disorders of piracy; whereas the numerous detached communities,
even if they had self-government secured by charter,
were in practice wholly dependent on the Roman governors.

Elevation of Urban Life in Asia

The Romans failed not to see that with the task of representing
Hellenism and protecting and extending the domain of Alexander
in the east there devolved on them the primary duty of elevating
the urban system; for, while cities are everywhere the pillars
of civilization, the antagonism between Orientals and Occidentals
was especially and most sharply embodied in the contrast between
the Oriental, military-despotic, feudal hierarchy and the Helleno-
Italic urban commonwealth prosecuting trade and commerce.  Lucullus
and Pompeius, however little they in other respects aimed at
the reduction of things to one level in the east, and however much
the latter was disposed in questions of detail to censure and alter
the arrangements of his predecessor, were yet completely agreed
in the principle of promoting as far as they could an urban life in Asia
Minor and Syria.  Cyzicus, on whose vigorous resistance the first
violence of the last war had spent itself, received from Lucullus
a considerable extension of its domain.  The Pontic Heraclea,
energetically as it had resisted the Romans, yet recovered
its territory and its harbours; and the barbarous fury of Cotta against
the unhappy city met with the sharpest censure in the senate.
Lucullus had deeply and sincerely regretted that fate had refused
him the happiness of rescuing Sinope and Amisus from devastation
by the Pontic soldiery and his own: he did at least what he could
to restore them, extended considerably their territories, peopled them
afresh--partly with the old inhabitants, who at his invitation
returned in troops to their beloved homes, partly with new settlers
of Hellenic descent--and provided for the reconstruction
of the buildings destroyed.  Pompeius acted in the same spirit
and on a greater scale.  Already after the subjugation of the pirates
he had, instead of following the example of his predecessors
and crucifying his prisoners, whose number exceeded 20,000, settled
them partly in the desolated cities of the Plain Cilicia,
such as Mallus, Adana, Epiphaneia, and especially in Soli,
which thenceforth bore the name of Pompeius' city (Pompeiupolis),
partly at Dyme in Achaia, and even at Tarentum.  This colonizing
by means of pirates met with manifold censure,(22) as it seemed
in some measure to set a premium on crime; in reality it was,
politically and morally, well justified, for, as things then stood,
piracy was something different from robbery and the prisoners
might fairly be treated according to martial law.

New Towns Established

But Pompeius made it his business above all to promote urban life
in the new Roman provinces.  We have already observed how poorly
provided with towns the Pontic empire was:(23) most districts
of Cappadocia even a century after this had no towns, but merely
mountain fortresses as a refuge for the agricultural population
in war; the whole east of Asia Minor, apart from the sparse Greek
colonies on the coasts, must have been at this time in a similar
plight.  The number of towns newly established by Pompeius in these
provinces is, including the Cilician settlements, stated at thirty-
nine, several of which attained great prosperity.  The most notable
of these townships in the former kingdom of Pontus were Nicopolis,
the "city of victory," founded on the spot where Mithradates
sustained the last decisive defeat(24)--the fairest memorial
of a general rich in similar trophies; Megalopolis, named from Pompeius'
surname, on the frontier of Cappadocia and Lesser Armenia,
the subsequent Sebasteia (now Siwas); Ziela, where the Romans fought
the unfortunate battle,(25) a township which had arisen round
the temple of Anaitis there and hitherto had belonged to its high-
priest, and to which Pompeius now gave the form and privileges
of a city; Diopolis, formerly Cabira, afterwards Neocaesarea (Niksar),
likewise one of the battle-fields of the late war; Magnopolis
or Pompeiupolis, the restored Eupatoria at the confluence of the Lycus
and the Iris, originally built by Mithradates, but again destroyed
by him on account of the defection of the city to the Romans;(26)
Neapolis, formerly Phazemon, between Amasia and the Halys.  Most
of the towns thus established were formed not by bringing
colonists from a distance, but by the suppression of villages
and the collection of their inhabitants within the new ring-wall;
only in Nicopolis Pompeius settled the invalids and veterans of his army,
who preferred to establish a home for themselves there at once
rather than afterwards in Italy.  But at other places also
there arose on the suggestion of the regent new centres of Hellenic
civilization.  In Paphlagonia a third Pompeiupolis marked the spot
where the army of Mithradates in 666 achieved the great victory
over the Bithynians.(27)  In Cappadocia, which perhaps had suffered
more than any other province by the war, the royal residence Mazaca
(afterwards Caesarea, now Kaisarieh) and seven other townships
were re-established by Pompeius and received urban institutions.
In Cilicia and Coelesyria there were enumerated twenty towns laid
out by Pompeius.  In the districts ceded by the Jews, Gadara
in the Decapolis rose from its ruins at the command of Pompeius,
and the city of Seleucis was founded.  By far the greatest portion
of the domain-land at his disposal on the Asiatic continent must have
been applied by Pompeius for his new settlements; whereas in Crete,
about which Pompeius troubled himself little or not at all,
the Roman domanial possessions seem to have continued tolerably extensive.

Pompeius was no less intent on regulating and elevating the existing
communities than on founding new townships.  The abuses and usurpations
which prevailed were done away with as far as lay in his power;
detailed ordinances drawn up carefully for the different provinces
regulated the particulars of the municipal system.  A number
of the most considerable cities had fresh privileges conferred on them.
Autonomy was bestowed on Antioch on the Orontes, the most important
city of Roman Asia and but little inferior to the Egyptian Alexandria
and to the Bagdad of antiquity, the city of Seleucia in the Parthian
empire; as also on the neighbour of Antioch, the Pierian Seleucia,
which was thus rewarded for its courageous resistance to Tigranes;
on Gaza and generally on all the towns liberated from the Jewish rule;
on Mytilene in the west of Asia Minor; and on Phanagoria
on the Black Sea.

Aggregate Results

Thus was completed the structure of the Roman state in Asia,
which with its feudatory kings and vassals, its priests made
into princes, and its series of free and half-free cities puts
us vividly in mind of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation.
It was no miraculous work, either as respects the difficulties
overcome or as respects the consummation attained; nor was it made
so by all the high-sounding words, which the Roman world of quality
lavished in favour of Lucullus and the artless multitude in praise
of Pompeius.  Pompeius in particular consented to be praised,
and praised himself, in such a fashion that people might
almost have reckoned him still more weak-minded than he really was.
If the Mytilenaeans erected a statue to him as their deliverer
and founder, as the man who had as well by land as by sea terminated
the wars with which the world was filled, such a homage might
not seem too extravagant for the vanquisher of the pirates
and of the empires of the east.  But the Romans this time surpassed
the Greeks.  The triumphal inscriptions of Pompeius himself enumerated
12 millions of people as subjugated and 1538 cities and strongholds
as conquered--it seemed as if quantity was to make up for quality--
and made the circle of his victories extend from the Maeotic Sea
to the Caspian and from the latter to the Red Sea, when his eyes had
never seen any one of the three; nay farther, if he did not exactly
say so, he at any late induced the public to suppose that the annexation
of Syria, which in truth was no heroic deed, had added
the whole east as far as Bactria and India to the Roman empire--
so dim was the mist of distance, amidst which according to his
statements the boundary-line of his eastern conquests was lost.
The democratic servility, which has at all times rivalled
that of courts, readily entered into these insipid extravagances.
It was not satisfied by the pompous triumphal procession, which moved
through the streets of Rome on the 28th and 29th Sept. 693--
the forty-sixth birthday of Pompeius the Great--adorned, to say nothing
of jewels of all sorts, by the crown insignia of Mithradates
and by the children of the three mightiest kings of Asia, Mithradates,
Tigranes, and Phraates; it rewarded its general, who had conquered
twenty-two kings, with regal honours and bestowed on him the golden
chaplet and the insignia of the magistracy for life.  The coins struck
in his honour exhibit the globe itself placed amidst the triple
laurels brought home from the three continents, and surmounted
by the golden chaplet conferred by the burgesses on the man
who had triumphed over Africa, Spain, and Asia.  It need excite
no surprise, if in presence of such childish acts of homage voices
were heard of an opposite import.  Among the Roman world of quality
it was currently affirmed that the true merit of having subdued
the east belonged to Lucullus, and that Pompeius had only gone thither
to supplant Lucullus and to wreathe around his own brow the laurels
which another hand had plucked.  Both statements were totally
erroneous: it was not Pompeius but Glabrio that was sent to Asia
to relieve Lucullus, and, bravely as Lucullus had fought, it was
a fact that, when Pompeius took the supreme command, the Romans
had forfeited all their earlier successes and had not a foot's breadth
of Pontic soil in their possession.  More pointed and effective
was the ridicule of the inhabitants of the capital, who failed not
to nickname the mighty conqueror of the globe after the great powers
which he had conquered, and saluted him now as "conqueror of Salem,"
now as "emir" (-Arabarches-), now as the Roman Sampsiceramus.

Lucullus and Pompeius as Administrators

The unprejudiced judge will not agree either with those exaggerations
or with these disparagements.  Lucullus and Pompeius, in subduing
and regulating Asia, showed themselves to be, not heroes
and state-creators, but sagacious and energetic army-leaders
and governors.  As general Lucullus displayed no common talents
and a self-confidence bordering on rashness, while Pompeius displayed
military judgment and a rare self-restraint; for hardly
has any general with such forces and a position so wholly free
ever acted so cautiously as Pompeius in the east.  The most brilliant
undertakings, as it were, offered themselves to him on all sides;
he was free to start for the Cimmerian Bosporus and for the Red
Sea; he had opportunity of declaring war against the Parthians;
the revolted provinces of Egypt invited him to dethrone king
Ptolemaeus who was not recognized by the Romans, and to carry
out the testament of Alexander; but Pompeius marched neither
to Panticapaeum nor to Petra, neither to Ctesiphon nor to Alexandria;
throughout he gathered only those fruits which of themselves fell
to his hand.  In like manner he fought all his battles by sea
and land with a crushing superiority of force.  Had this moderation
proceeded from the strict observance of the instructions given
to him, as Pompeius was wont to profess, or even from a perception
that the conquests of Rome must somewhere find a limit and that
fresh accessions of territory were not advantageous to the state,
it would deserve a higher praise than history confers on the most
talented officer; but constituted as Pompeius was, his self-
restraint was beyond doubt solely the result of his peculiar want
of decision and of initiative--defects, indeed, which were in his
case far more useful to the state than the opposite excellences
of his predecessor.  Certainly very grave errors were perpetrated
both by Lucullus and by Pompeius.  Lucullus reaped their fruits himself,
when his imprudent conduct wrested from him all the results
of his victories; Pompeius left it to his successors to bear
the consequences of his false policy towards the Parthians.  He might
either have made war on the Parthians, if he had had the courage
to do so, or have maintained peace with them and recognized,
as he had promised, the Euphrates as boundary; he was too timid
for the former course, too vain for the latter, and so he resorted
to the silly perfidy of rendering the good neighbourhood,
which the court of Ctesiphon desired and on its part practised,
impossible through the most unbounded aggressions, and yet allowing
the enemy to choose of themselves the time for rupture and retaliation.
As administrator of Asia Lucullus acquired a more than princely
wealth; and Pompeius also received as reward for its organization
large sums in cash and still more considerable promissory notes
from the king of Cappadocia, from the rich city of Antioch,
and from other lords and communities.  But such exactions had become
almost a customary tax; and both generals showed themselves at any rate
to be not altogether venal in questions of greater importance,
and, if possible, got themselves paid by the party whose interests
coincided with those of Rome.  Looking to the state of the times,
this does not prevent us from characterizing the administration
of both as comparatively commendable and conducted primarily
in the interest of Rome, secondarily in that of the provincials.

The conversion of the clients into subjects, the better regulation
of the eastern frontier, the establishment of a single and strong
government, were full of blessing for the rulers as well as
for the ruled.  The financial gain acquired by Rome was immense;
the new property tax, which with the exception of some specially
exempted communities all those princes, priests, and cities had to pay
to Rome, raised the Roman state-revenues almost by a half above their
former amount.  Asia indeed suffered severely.  Pompeius brought
in money and jewels an amount of 2,000,000 pounds (200,000,000
sesterces) into the state-chest and distributed 3,900,000 pounds
(16,000 talents) among his officers and soldiers; if we add to this
the considerable sums brought home by Lucullus, the non-official
exactions of the Roman army, and the amount of the damage done
by the war, the financial exhaustion of the land may be readily
conceived.  The Roman taxation of Asia was perhaps in itself
not worse than that of its earlier rulers, but it formed a heavier
burden on the land, in so far as the taxes thenceforth went
out of the country and only the lesser portion of the proceeds
was again expended in Asia; and at any rate it was, in the old
as well as the newly-acquired provinces, based on a systematic plundering
of the provinces for the benefit of Rome.  But the responsibility
for this rests far less on the generals personally than on the parties
at home, whom these had to consider; Lucullus had even exerted himself
energetically to set limits to the usurious dealings of the Roman
capitalists in Asia, and this essentially contributed to bring
about his fall.  How much both men earnestly sought to revive
the prosperity of the reduced provinces, is shown by their action
in cases where no considerations of party policy tied their hands,
and especially in their care for the cities of Asia Minor.  Although
for centuries afterwards many an Asiatic village lying in ruins
recalled the times of the great war, Sinope might well begin a new
era with the date of its re-establishment by Lucullus, and almost
all the more considerable inland towns of the Pontic kingdom might
gratefully honour Pompeius as their founder.  The organization
of Roman Asia by Lucullus and Pompeius may with all its undeniable
defects be described as on the whole judicious and praiseworthy;
serious as were the evils that might still adhere to it,
it could not but be welcome to the sorely tormented Asiatics
for the very reason that it came attended by the inward
and outward peace, the absence of which had been so long
and so painfully felt.

The East after the Departure of Pompeius

Peace continued substantially in the east, till the idea--merely
indicated by Pompeius with his characteristic timidity--of joining
the regions eastward of the Euphrates to the Roman empire was taken
up again energetically but unsuccessfully by the new triumvirate
of Roman regents, and soon thereafter the civil war drew the eastern
provinces as well as all the rest into its fatal vortex.
In the interval the governors of Cilicia had to fight constantly
with the mountain-tribes of the Amanus and those of Syria with the hordes
of the desert, and in the latter war against the Bedouins especially
many Roman troops were destroyed; but these movements had no farther
significance.  More remarkable was the obstinate resistance,
which the tough Jewish nation opposed to the conquerors.  Alexander,
son of the deposed king Aristobulus, and Aristobulus himself
who after some time succeeded in escaping from captivity,
excited during the governorship of Aulus Gabinius (697-700)
three different revolts against the new rulers, to each of which
the government of the high-priest Hyrcanus installed by Rome impotently
succumbed.  It was not political conviction, but the invincible repugnance
of the Oriental towards the unnatural yoke, which compelled them
to kick against the pricks; as indeed the last and most dangerous
of these revolts, for which the withdrawal of the Syrian army
of occupation in consequence of the Egyptian crisis furnished
the immediate impulse, began with the murder of the Romans
settled in Palestine.  It was not without difficulty
that the able governor succeeded in rescuing the few Romans,
who had escaped this fate and found a temporary refuge
on Mount Gerizim, from the insurgents who kept them blockaded there,
and in overpowering the revolt after several severely contested
battles and tedious sieges.  In consequence of this the monarchy
of the high-priests was abolished and the Jewish land was broken up
as Macedonia had formerly been, into five independent districts
administered by governing colleges with an Optimate organization;
Samaria and other townships razed by the Jews were re-established,
to form a counterpoise to Jerusalem; and lastly a heavier tribute
was imposed on the Jews than on the other Syrian subjects of Rome.

The Kingdom of Egypt

It still remains that we should glance at the kingdom of Egypt
along with the last dependency that remained to it of the extensive
acquisitions of the Lagids, the fair island of Cyprus.
Egypt was now the only state of the Hellenic east that was still
at least nominally independent; just as formerly, when the Persians
established themselves along the eastern half of the Mediterranean,
Egypt was their last conquest, so now the mighty conquerors
from the west long delayed the annexation of that opulent
and peculiar country.  The reason lay, as was already indicated,
neitherin any fear of the resistance of Egypt nor in the want
of a fitting occasion.  Egypt was just about as powerless as Syria,
and had already in 673 fallen in all due form of law to the Roman
community.(28)  The control exercised over the court of Alexandria
by the royal guard--which appointed and deposed ministers
and occasionally kings, took for itself what it pleased, and,
if it was refused a rise of pay, besieged the king in his palace--
was by no means liked in the country or rather in the capital (for
the country with its population of agricultural slaves was hardly taken
into account); and at least a party there wished for the annexation
of Egypt by Rome, and even took steps to procure it But the less
the kings of Egypt could think of contending in arms against Rome,
the more energetically Egyptian gold set itself to resist the Roman
plans of union; and in consequence of the peculiar despotico-
communistic centralization of the Egyptian finances the revenues
of the court of Alexandria were still nearly equal to the public
income of Rome even after its augmentation by Pompeius.
The suspicious jealousy of the oligarchy, which was chary of allowing
any individual either to conquer or to administer Egypt, operated
in the same direction.  So the de facto rulers of Egypt and Cyprus
were enabled by bribing the leading men in the senate not merely
to respite their tottering crowns, but even to fortify them afresh
and to purchase from the senate the confirmation of their royal title.
But with this they had not yet obtained their object.
Formal state-law required a decree of the Roman burgesses;
until this was issued, the Ptolemies were dependent on the caprice
of every democratic holder of power, and they had thus to commence
the warfare of bribery also against the other Roman party,
which as the more powerful stipulated for far higher prices.

Cyprus Annexed

The result in the two cases was different.  The annexation
of Cyprus was decreed in 696 by the people, that is, by the leaders
of the democracy, the support given to piracy by the Cypriots
being alleged as the official reason why that course should
now be adopted.  Marcus Cato, entrusted by his opponents
with the execution of this measure, came to the island without an army;
but he had no need of one.  The king took poison; the inhabitants
submitted without offering resistance to their inevitable fate,
and were placed under the governor of Cilicia.  The ample treasure
of nearly 7000 talents (1,700,000 pounds), which the equally
covetous and miserly king could not prevail on himself to apply
for the bribes requisite to save his crown, fell along with the latter
to the Romans, and filled after a desirable fashion the empty vaults
of their treasury.

Ptolemaeus in Egypt Recognized but Expelled by His Subjects

On the other hand the brother who reigned in Egypt succeeded
in purchasing his recognition by decree of the people from the new
masters of Rome in 695; the purchase-money is said to have amounted
to 6000 talents (1,460,000 pounds).  The citizens indeed, long
exasperated against their good flute-player and bad ruler,
and now reduced to extremities by the definitive loss of Cyprus
and the pressure of the taxes which were raised to an intolerable
degree in consequence of the transactions with the Romans (696),
chased him on that account out of the country.  When the king thereupon
applied, as if on account of his eviction from the estate which he
had purchased, to those who sold it, these were reasonable enough
to see that it was their duty as honest men of business to get back
his kingdom for Ptolemaeus; only the parties could not agree
as to the person to whom the important charge of occupying Egypt
by force along with the perquisites thence to be expected should
be assigned.  It was only when the triumvirate was confirmed anew
at the conference of Luca, that this affair was also arranged,
after Ptolemaeus had agreed to a further payment of 10,000 talents
(2,400,000 pounds); the governor of Syria, Aulus Gabinius,
now obtained orders from those in power to take the necessary steps
immediately for bringing back the king.  The citizens of Alexandria
had meanwhile placed the crown on the head of Berenice the eldest
daughter of the ejected king, and given to her a husband
in the person of one of the spiritual princes of Roman Asia,
Archelaus the high-priest of Comana,(29) who possessed ambition enough
to hazard his secure and respectable position in the hope of mounting
the throne of the Lagids.  His attempts to gain the Roman regents
to his interests remained without success; but he did not recoil
before the idea of being obliged to maintain his new kingdom
with arms in hand even against the Romans.

And Brought Back by Gabinius
A Roman Garrison Remains in Alexandria

Gabinius, without ostensible powers to undertake war against Egypt
but directed to do so by the regents, made a pretext out of
the alleged furtherance of piracy by the Egyptians and the building
of a fleet by Archelaus, and started without delay for the Egyptian
frontier (699).  The march through the sandy desert between Gaza
and Pelusium, in which so many invasions previously directed
against Egypt had broken down, was on this occasion successfully
accomplished--a result especially due to the quick and skilful
leader of the cavalry Marcus Antonius.  The frontier fortress
of Pelusium also was surrendered without resistance by the Jewish
garrison stationed there.  In front of this city the Romans met
the Egyptians, defeated them--on which occasion Antonius again
distinguished himself--and arrived, as the first Roman army,
at the Nile.  Here the fleet and army of the Egyptians were drawn up
for the last decisive struggle; but the Romans once more conquered,
and Archelaus himself with many of his followers perished
in the combat.  Immediately after this battle the capital surrendered,
and therewith all resistance was at an end.  The unhappy land
was handed over to its legitimate oppressor; the hanging and beheading,
with which, but for the intervention of the chivalrous Antonius,
Ptolemaeus would have already in Pelusium begun to celebrate
the restoration of the legitimate government, now took its course
unhindered, and first of all the innocent daughter was sent
by her father to the scaffold.  The payment of the reward agreed
upon with the regents broke down through the absolute impossibility
of exacting from the exhausted land the enormous sums required,
although they took from the poor people the last penny; but care
was taken that the country should at least be kept quiet
by the garrison of Roman infantry and Celtic and German cavalry
left in the capital, which took the place of the native praetorians
and otherwise emulated them not unsuccessfully.  The previous hegemony
of Rome over Egypt was thus converted into a direct military
occupation, and the nominal continuance of the native monarchy
was not so much a privilege granted to the land as a double
burden imposed on it.




Chapter V

The Struggle of Parties During the Absence of Pompeius.

The Defeated Aristocracy

With the passing of the Gabinian law the parties in the capital
changed positions.  From the time that the elected general
of the democracy held in his hand the sword, his party,
or what was reckoned such, had the preponderance in the capital.
The nobility doubtless still stood in compact array, and still
as before there issued from the comitial machinery none but consuls,
who according to the expression of the democrats were already
designated to the consulate in their cradles; to command the elections
andbreak down the influence of the old families over them was beyond
the power even of the holders of power.  But unfortunately the consulate,
at the very moment when they had got the length of virtually excluding
the "new men" from it, began itself to grow pale before the newly-
risen star of the exceptional military power.  The aristocracy felt
this, though they did not exactly confess it; they gave themselves
up as lost.  Except Quintus Catulus, who with honourable firmness
persevered at his far from pleasant post as champion of a vanquished
party down to his death (694), no Optimate could be named
from the highest ranks of the nobility, who would have sustained
the interests of the aristocracy with courage and steadfastness.
Their very men of most talent and fame, such as Quintus Metellus
Pius and Lucius Lucullus, practically abdicated and retired,
so far as they could at all do so with propriety, to their villas,
in order to forget as much as possible the Forum and the senate-house
amidst their gardens and libraries, their aviaries and fish-ponds.
Still more, of course, was this the case with the younger generation
of the aristocracy, which was either wholly absorbed in luxury
and literature or turning towards the rising sun.

Cato

There was among the younger men a single exception; it was
Marcus Porcius Cato (born in 659), a man of the best intentions
and of rare devotedness, and yet one of the most Quixotic
and one of the most cheerless phenomena in this age so abounding
in political caricatures.  Honourable and steadfast, earnest in purpose
and in action, full of attachment to his country and to its hereditary
constitution, but dull in intellect and sensuously as well as
morally destitute of passion, he might certainly have made
a tolerable state-accountant.  But unfortunately he fell early
under the power of formalism, and swayed partly by the phrases
of the Stoa, which in their abstract baldness and spiritless
isolation were current among the genteel world of that day, partly
by the example of his great-grandfather whom he deemed it his especial
task to reproduce, he began to walk about in the sinful capital
as a model burgess and mirror of virtue, to scold at the times
like the old Cato, to travel on foot instead of riding, to take
no interest, to decline badges of distinction as a soldier,
and to introduce the restoration of the good old days by going after
the precedent of king Romulus without a shirt.  A strange caricature
of his ancestor--the gray-haired farmer whom hatred and anger made
an orator, who wielded in masterly style the plough as well as
the sword, who with his narrow, but original and sound common sense
ordinarily hit the nail on the head--was this young unimpassioned
pedant from whose lips dropped scholastic wisdom and who was
everywhere seen sitting book in hand, this philosopher
who understood neither the art of war nor any other art whatever,
this cloud-walker in the realm of abstract morals.  Yet he attained
to moral and thereby even to political importance.  In an utterly
wretched and cowardly age his courage and his negative virtues told
powerfully on the multitude; he even formed a school, and there were
individuals--it is true they were but few--who in their turn
copied and caricatured afresh the living pattern of a philosopher.
On the same cause depended also his political influence.
As he was the only conservative of note who possessed if not talent
and insight, at any rate integrity and courage, and was always ready
to throw himself into the breach whether it was necessary to do so
or not, he soon became the recognized champion of the Optimate party,
although neither his age nor his rank nor his intellect entitled
him to be so.  Where the perseverance of a single resolute man
could decide, he no doubt sometimes achieved a success,
and in questions of detail, more particularly of a financial character,
he often judiciously interfered, as indeed he was absent
from no meeting of the senate; his quaestorship in fact formed
an epoch, and as long as he lived he checked the details of the public
budget, regarding which he maintained of course a constant warfare
with the farmers of the taxes.  For the rest, he lacked simply
every ingredient of a statesman.  He was incapable of even
comprehending a political aim and of surveying political relations;
his whole tactics consisted in setting his face against every one
who deviated or seemed to him to deviate from the traditionary
moral and political catechism of the aristocracy, and thus
of course he worked as often into the hands of his opponents
as into those of his own party.  The Don Quixote of the aristocracy,
he proved by his character and his actions that at this time,
while there was certainly still an aristocracy in existence,
the aristocratic policy was nothing more than a chimera.

Democratic Attacks

To continue the conflict with this aristocracy brought little
honour.  Of course the attacks of the democracy on the vanquished
foe did not on that account cease.  The pack of the Populares threw
themselves on the broken ranks of the nobility like the sutlers
on a conquered camp, and the surface at least of politics
was by this agitation ruffled into high waves of foam.  The multitude
entered into the matter the more readily, as Gaius Caesar especially
kept them in good humour by the extravagant magnificence of his games
(689)--in which all the equipments, even the cages of the wild
beasts, appeared of massive silver--and generally by a liberality
which was all the more princely that it was based solely
on the contraction of debt.  The attacks on the nobility
were of the most varied kind.  The abuses of aristocratic rule afforded
copious materials; magistrates and advocates who were liberal or assumed
a liberal hue, like Gaius Cornelius, Aulus Gabinius, Marcus Cicero,
continued systematically to unveil the most offensive and scandalous
aspects of the Optimate doings and to propose laws against them.
The senate was directed to give access to foreign envoys on set days,
with the view of preventing the usual postponement of audiences.
Loans raised by foreign ambassadors in Rome were declared non-actionable,
as this was the only means of seriously checking the corruptions
which formed the order of the day in the senate (687).  The right
of the senate to give dispensation in particular cases from the laws
was restricted (687); as was also the abuse whereby every Roman of rank,
who had private business to attend to in the provinces, got himself
invested by the senate with the character of a Roman envoy thither
(691).  They heightened the penalties against the purchase
of votes and electioneering intrigues (687, 691); which latter
were especially increased in a scandalous fashion by the attempts
of the individuals ejected from the senate(1) to get back
to it through re-election.

What had hitherto been simply understood as matter of course
was now expressly laid down as a law, that the praetors were bound
to administer justice in conformity with the rules set forth by them,
after the Roman fashion, at their entering on office (687).

Transpadanes
Freedmen

But, above all, efforts were made to complete the democratic
restoration and to realize the leading ideas of the Gracchan period
in a form suitable to the times.  The election of the priests
by the comitia, which Gnaeus Domitius had introduced(2) and Sulla
had again done away,(3) was established by a law of the tribune
of the people Titus Labienus in 691.  The democrats were fond
of pointing out how much was still wanting towards the restoration
of the Sempronian corn-laws in their full extent, and at the same
time passed over in silence the fact that under the altered
circumstances--with the straitened condition of the public finances
and the great increase in the number of fully-privileged Roman
citizens--that restoration was absolutely impracticable.
In the country between the Po and the Alps they zealously fostered
the agitation for political equality with the Italians.
As early as 686 Gaius Caesar travelled from place to place there
for this purpose; in 689 Marcus Crassus as censor made arrangements
to enrol the inhabitants directly in the burgess-roll--which was only
frustrated by the resistance of his colleague; in the following
censorships this attempt seems regularly to have been repeated.
As formerly Gracchus and Flaccus had been the patrons of the Latins,
so the present leaders of the democracy gave themselves forth
as protectors of the Transpadanes, and Gaius Piso (consul in 687)
had bitterly to regret that he had ventured to outrage
one of these clients of Caesar and Crassus.  On the other hand
the same leaders appeared by no means disposed to advocate
the political equalization of the freedmen; the tribune of the people
Gaius Manilius, who in a thinly attended assembly had procured
the renewal (31 Dec. 687) of the Sulpician law as to the suffrage
of freedmen,(4) was immediately disavowed by the leading men
of the democracy, and with their consent the law was cancelled
by the senate on the very day after its passing.  In the same spirit
all the strangers, who possessed neither Roman nor Latin burgess-
rights, were ejected from the capital by decree of the people
in 689.  It is obvious that the intrinsic inconsistency
of the Gracchan policy--in abetting at once the effort of the excluded
to obtain admission into the circle of the privileged, and the effort
of the privileged to maintain their distinctive rights--had passed
over to their successors; while Caesar and his friends on the one hand
held forth to the Transpadanes the prospect of the franchise,
they on the other hand gave their assent to the continuance
of the disabilities of the freedmen, and to the barbarous setting aside
of the rivalry which the industry and trading skill of the Hellenes
and Orientals maintained with the Italians in Italy itself.

Process against Rabirius

The mode in which the democracy dealt with the ancient criminal
jurisdiction of the comitia was characteristic.  It had not been
properly abolished by Sulla, but practically the jury-commissions
on high treason and murder had superseded it,(5) and no rational
man could think of seriously re-establishing the old procedure
which long before Sulla had been thoroughly unpractical.
But as the idea of the sovereignty of the people appeared to require
a recognition at least in principle of the penal jurisdiction
of the burgesses, the tribune of the people Titus Labienus in 691
brought the old man, who thirty-eight years before had slain or was
alleged to have slain the tribune of the people Lucius Saturninus,(6)
before the same high court of criminal jurisdiction, by virtue of which,
if the annals reported truly, king Tullus had procured the acquittal
of the Horatius who had killed his sister.  The accused was one
Gaius Rabirius, who, if he had not killed Saturninus,
had at least paraded with his cut-off head at the tables
of men of rank, and who moreover was notorious among the Apulian
landholders for his kidnapping and his bloody deeds.  The object,
if not of the accuser himself, at any rate of the more sagacious men
who backed him, was not at all to make this pitiful wretch
die the death of the cross; they were not unwilling to acquiesce,
when first the form of the impeachment was materially modified
by the senate, and then the assembly of the people called to pronounce
sentence on the guilty was dissolved under some sort of pretext
by the opposite party--so that the whole procedure was set aside.
At all events by this process the two palladia of Roman freedom,
the right of the citizens to appeal and the inviolability of the tribunes
of the people, were once more established as practical rights,
and the legal basis on which the democracy rested was adjusted afresh.

Personal Attacks

The democratic reaction manifested still greater vehemence
in all personal questions, wherever it could and dared.
Prudence indeed enjoined it not to urge the restoration of the estates
confiscated by Sulla to their former owners, that it might not quarrel
with its own allies and at the same time fall into a conflict
with material interests, for which a policy with a set purpose
is rarelya match; the recall of the emigrants was too closely connected
with this question of property not to appear quite as unadvisable.
On the other hand great exertions were made to restore to the children
of the proscribed the political rights withdrawn from them (691),
and the heads of the senatorial party were incessantly subjected
to personal attacks.  Thus Gaius Memmius set on foot a process aimed
at Marcus Lucullus in 688.  Thus they allowed his more famous
brother to wait for three years before the gates of the capital
for his well-deserved triumph (688-691).  Quintus Rex and the conqueror
of Crete Quintus Metellus were similarly insulted.

It produced a still greater sensation, when the young leader
of the democracy Gaius Caesar in 691 not merely presumed to compete
with the two most distinguished men of the nobility, Quintus Catulus
and Publius Servilius the victor of Isaura, in the candidature
for the supreme pontificate, but even carried the day
among the burgesses.  The heirs of Sulla, especially his son Faustus,
found themselves constantly threatened with an action for the refunding
of the public moneys which, it was alleged, had been embezzled
by the regent.  They talked even of resuming the democratic
impeachments suspended in 664 on the basis of the Varian law.(7)
The individuals who had taken part in the Sullan executions were,
as may readily be conceived, judicially prosecuted with the utmost
zeal.  When the quaestor Marcus Cato, in his pedantic integrity,
himself made a beginning by demanding back from them the rewards
which they had received for murder as property illegally alienated
from the state (689), it can excite no surprise that in the following
year (690) Gaius Caesar, as president of the commission
regarding murder, summarily treated the clause in the Sullan
ordinance, which declared that a proscribed person might be
killed with impunity, as null and void, and caused the most
noted of Sulla's executioners, Lucius Catilina, Lucius Bellienus,
Lucius Luscius to be brought before his jurymen and, partially,
to be condemned.

Rehabilitation of Saturninus and Marius

Lastly, they did not hesitate now to name once more in public
the long-proscribed names of the heroes and martyrs of the democracy,
and to celebrate their memory.  We have already mentioned how
Saturninus was rehabilitated by the process directed against
his murderer.  But a different sound withal had the name of Gaius
Marius, at the mention of which all hearts once had throbbed;
and it happened that the man, to whom Italy owed her deliverance
from the northern barbarians, was at the same time the uncle
of the present leader of the democracy.  Loudly had the multitude
rejoiced, when in 686 Gaius Caesar ventured in spite of
the prohibitions publicly to show the honoured features of the hero
in the Forum at the interment of the widow of Marius.  But when,
three years afterwards (689), the emblems of victory, which Marius
had caused to be erected in the Capitol and Sulla had ordered to be
thrown down, one morning unexpectedly glittered afresh in gold
and marble at the old spot, the veterans from the African and Cimbrian
wars crowded, with tears in their eyes, around the statue of their
beloved general; and in presence of the rejoicing masses the senate
did not venture to seize the trophies which the same bold hand had
renewed in defiance of the laws.

Worthlessness of the Democratic Successes

But all these doings and disputes, however much noise they made,
were, politically considered, of but very subordinate importance.
The oligarchy was vanquished; the democracy had attained the helm.
That underlings of various grades should hasten to inflict
an additional kick on the prostrate foe; that the democrats also
should have their basis in law and their worship of principles;
that their doctrinaires should not rest till the whole privileges
of the community were in all particulars restored, and should
in that respect occasionally make themselves ridiculous,
as legitimists are wont to do--all this was just as much
to be expected as it was matter of indifference.  Taken as a whole,
the agitation was aimless; and we discern in it the perplexity
of its authors to find an object for their activity, for it
turned almost wholly on things already essentially settled
or on subordinate matters.

Impending Collision between the Democrats and Pompeius

It could not be otherwise.  In the struggle with the aristocracy
the democrats had remained victors; but they had not conquered
alone, and the fiery trial still awaited them--the reckoning
not with their former foe, but with their too powerful ally,
to whom in the struggle with the aristocracy they were substantially
indebted for victory, and to whose hands they had now entrusted
an unexampled military and political power, because they dared
not refuse it to him.  The general of the east and of the seas
was still employed in appointing and deposing kings.  How long time
he would take for that work, or when he would declare the business
of the war to be ended, no one could tell but himself;
since like everything else the time of his return to Italy,
or in other words the day of decision, was left in his own hands.
The parties in Rome meanwhile sat and waited.  The Optimates indeed
looked forward to the arrival of the dreaded general with comparative
calmness; by the rupture between Pompeius and the democracy, which they
saw to be approaching, they could not lose, but could only gain.
The democrats on the contrary waited with painful anxiety,
and sought, during the interval still allowed to them
by the absence of Pompeius, to lay a countermine against
the impending explosion.

Schemes for Appointing a Democratic Military Dictatorship

In this policy they again coincided with Crassus,
to whom no course was left for encountering his envied and hated rival
but that of allying himself afresh, and more closely than before,
with the democracy.  Already in the first coalition a special
approximation had taken place between Caesar and Crassus
as the two weaker parties; a common interest and a common danger
tightened yet more the bond which joined the richest
and the most insolvent of Romans in closest alliance.
While in public the democrats described the absent general
as the head and pride of their party and seemed to direct
all their arrows against the aristocracy, preparations
were secretly made against Pompeius; and these attempts
of the democracy to escape from the impending military dictatorship
have historically a far higher significance than the noisy agitation,
for the most part employed only as a mask, against the nobility.
It is true that they were carried on amidst a darkness, upon which
our tradition allows only some stray gleams of light to fall;
for not the present alone, but the succeeding age also
had its reasons for throwing a veil over the matter.  But in general
both the course and the object of these efforts are completely clear.
The military power could only be effectually checkmated by another
military power.  The design of the democrats was to possess
themselves of the reins of government after the example of Marius
and Cinna, then to entrust one of their leaders either with the conquest
of Egypt or with the governorship of Spain or some similar
ordinary or extraordinary office, and thus to find in him
and his military force a counterpoise to Pompeius and his army.
For this they required a revolution, which was directed immediately
against the nominal government, but in reality against Pompeius
as the designated monarch;(8) and, to effect this revolution,
there was from the passing of the Gabinio-Manilian laws down to
the return of Pompeius (688-692) perpetual conspiracy in Rome.
The capital was in anxious suspense; the depressed temper
of the capitalists, the suspensions of payment, the frequent bankruptcies
were heralds of the fermenting revolution, which seemed as though it must
at the same time produce a totally new position of parties.
The project of the democracy, which pointed beyond the senate
at Pompeius, suggested an approximation between that general
and the senate.  But the democracy in attempting to oppose
to the dictatorship of Pompeius that of a man more agreeable to it,
recognized, strictly speaking, on its part also the military government,
and in reality drove out Satan by Beelzebub; the question of principles
became in its hands a question of persons.

League of the Democrats and the Anarchists

The first step towards the revolution projected by the leaders
of the democracy was thus to be the overthrow of the existing
government by means of an insurrection primarily instigated
in Rome by democratic conspirators.  The moral condition of the lowest
as of the highest ranks of society in the capital presented
the materials for this purpose in lamentable abundance.  We need not
here repeat what was the character of the free and the servile
proletariate of the capital.  The significant saying was already
heard, that only the poor man was qualified to represent the poor;
the idea was thus suggested, that the mass of the poor might
constitute itself an independent power as well as the oligarchy
of the rich, and instead of allowing itself to be tyrannized over,
might perhaps in its own turn play the tyrant.  But even in the circles
of the young men of rank similar ideas found an echo.
The fashionable life of the capital shattered not merely the fortunes
of men, but also their vigour of body and mind.  That elegant world
of fragrant ringlets, of fashionable mustachios and ruffles--merry
as were its doings in the dance and with the harp, and early
and late at the wine-cup--yet concealed in its bosom an alarming abyss
of moral and economic ruin, of well or ill concealed despair,
and frantic or knavish resolves.  These circles sighed without
disguise for a return of the time of Cinna with its proscriptions
and confiscations and its annihilation of account-books for debt;
there were people enough, including not a few of no mean descent
and unusual abilities, who only waited the signal to fall
like a gang of robbers on civil society and to recruit by pillage
the fortune which they had squandered.  Where a band gathers,
leaders are not wanting; and in this case the men were soon found
who were fitted to be captains of banditti.

Catalina

The late praetor Lucius Catilina, and the quaestor Gnaeus Piso,
were distinguished among their fellows not merely by their genteel
birth and their superior rank.  They had broken down the bridge
completely behind them, and impressed their accomplices by their
dissoluteness quite as much as by their talents.  Catilina especially
was one of the most wicked men in that wicked age.  His villanies
belong to the records of crime, not to history; but his very outward
appearance--the pale countenance, the wild glance, the gait by turns
sluggish and hurried--betrayed his dismal past.  He possessed in a high
degree the qualities which are required in the leader of such a band--
the faculty of enjoying all pleasures and of bearing all privations,
courage, military talent, knowledge of men, the energy of a felon,
and that horrible mastery of vice, which knows how to bring the weak
to fall and how to train the fallen to crime.

To form out of such elements a conspiracy for the overthrow
of the existing order of things could not be difficult to men
who possessed money and political influence.  Catilina, Piso,
and their fellows entered readily into any plan which gave the prospect
of proscriptions and cancelling of debtor-books; the former had
moreover special hostility to the aristocracy, because it had opposed
the candidature of that infamous and dangerous man for the consulship.
As he had formerly in the character of an executioner
of Sulla hunted the proscribed at the head of a band of Celts
and had killed among others his own aged father-in-law
with his own hand, he now readily consented to promise similar services
to the opposite party.  A secret league was formed.  The number
of individuals received into it is said to have exceeded 400; it
included associates in all the districts and urban communities
of Italy; besides which, as a matter of course, numerous recruits
would flock unbidden from the ranks of the dissolute youth
to an insurrection, which inscribed on its banner the seasonable
programme of wiping out debts.

Failure of the First Plans of Conspiracy

In December 688--so we are told--the leaders of the league thought
that they had found the fitting occasion for striking a blow.
The two consuls chosen for 689, Publius Cornelius Sulla and Publius
Autronius Paetus, had recently been judicially convicted
of electoral bribery, and therefore had according to legal rule
forfeited their expectancy of the highest office.  Both thereupon
joined the league.  The conspirators resolved to procure
the consulship for them by force, and thereby to put themselves
in possession of the supreme power in the state.  On the day
when the new consuls should enter on their office--the 1st Jan. 689--
the senate-house was to be assailed by armed men, the new consuls
and the victims otherwise designated were to be put to death, and Sulla
and Paetus were to be proclaimed as consuls after the cancelling
of the judicial sentence which excluded them.  Crassus was then
to be invested with the dictatorship and Caesar with the mastership
of the horse, doubtless with a view to raise an imposing military
force, while Pompeius was employed afar off at the Caucasus.
Captains and common soldiers were hired and instructed; Catilina
waited on the appointed day in the neighbourhood of the senate-
house for the concerted signal, which was to be given him by Caesar
on a hint from Crassus.  But he waited in vain; Crassus was absent
from the decisive sitting of the senate, and for this time
the projected insurrection failed.  A similar still more comprehensive
plan of murder was then concerted for the 5th Feb.; but this too
was frustrated, because Catilina gave the signal too early,
before the bandits who were bespoken had all arrived.  Thereupon
the secret was divulged.  The government did not venture openly
to proceed against the conspiracy, but it assigned a guard
to the consuls who were primarily threatened, and it opposed to the band
of the conspirators a band paid by the government.  To remove Piso,
the proposal was made that he should be sent as quaestor
with praetorian powers to Hither Spain; to which Crassus consented,
in the hope of securing through him the resources of that important
province for the insurrection.  Proposals going farther
were prevented by the tribunes.

So runs the account that has come down to us, which evidently gives
the version current in the government circles, and the credibility
of which in detail must, in the absence of any means of checking
it, be left an open question.  As to the main matter--the participation
of Caesar and Crassus--the testimony of their political opponents
certainly cannot be regarded as sufficient evidence of it.  But their
notorious action at this epoch corresponds with striking exactness
to the secret action which this report ascribes to them.  The attempt
of Crassus, who in this year was censor, officially to enrol
the Transpadanes in the burgess-list(9) was of itself directly
a revolutionary enterprise.  It is still more remarkable,
that Crassus on the same occasion made preparations to enrol
Egypt and Cyprus in the list of Roman domains,(10) and that Caesar
about the same time (689 or 690) got a proposal submitted
by some tribunes to the burgesses to send him to Egypt,
in order to reinstate king Ptolemaeus whom the Alexandrians
had expelled.  These machinations suspiciously coincide
with the charges raised by their antagonists.  Certainty cannot be
attained on the point; but there is a great probability that Crassus
and Caesar had projected a plan to possess themselves of the military
dictatorship during the absence of Pompeius; that Egypt was selected
as the basis of this democratic military power; and that, in fine,
the insurrectionary attempt of 689 had been contrived to realize
these projects, and Catilina and Piso had thus been tools in the hands
of Crassus and Caesar.

Resumption of the Conspiracy

For a moment the conspiracy came to a standstill.  The elections
for 690 took place without Crassus and Caesar renewing their
attempt to get possession of the consulate; which may have been
partly owing to the fact that a relative of the leader
of the democracy, Lucius Caesar, a weak man who was not unfrequently
employed by his kinsman as a tool, was on this occasion a candidate
for the consulship.  But the reports from Asia urged them to make
haste.  The affairs of Asia Minor and Armenia were already
completely arranged.  However clearly democratic strategists showed
that the Mithradatic war could only be regarded as terminated
by the capture of the king, and that it was therefore necessary
to undertake the pursuit round the Black Sea, and above all things
to keep aloof from Syria(11)--Pompeius, not concerning himself
about such talk, had set out in the spring of 690 from Armenia
and marched towards Syria.  If Egypt was really selected
as the headquarters of the democracy, there was no time to be lost;
otherwise Pompeius might easily arrive in Egypt sooner than Caesar.
The conspiracy of 688, far from being broken up by the lax
and timid measures of repression, was again astir when the consular
elections for 691 approached.  The persons were, it may be
presumed, substantially the same, and the plan was but little
altered.  The leaders of the movement again kept in the background.
On this occasion they had set up as candidates for the consulship
Catilina himself and Gaius Antonius, the younger son of the orator
and a brother of the general who had an ill repute from Crete.
They were sure of Catilina; Antonius, originally a Sullan
like Catilina and like the latter brought to trial on that account
some years before by the democratic party and ejected
from the senate(12)--otherwise an indolent, insignificant man,
in no respect called to be a leader, and utterly bankrupt--
willingly lent himself as a tool to the democrats for the prize
of the consulship and the advantages attached to it.  Through these
consuls the heads of the conspiracy intended to seize the government,
to arrest the children of Pompeius, who remained behind in the capital,
as hostages, and to take up arms in Italy and the provinces
against Pompeius.  On the first news of the blow struck in the capital,
the governor Gnaeus Piso was to raise the banner of insurrection
in Hither Spain.  Communication could not be held with him by way
of the sea, since Pompeius commanded the seas.  For this purpose
they reckoned on the Transpadanes the old clients of the democracy--
among whom there was great agitation, and who would of course have
at once received the franchise--and, further, on different Celtic
tribes.(13)  The threads of this combination reached as far as
Mauretania.  One of the conspirators, the Roman speculator Publius
Sittius from Nuceria, compelled by financial embarrassments
to keep aloof from Italy, had armed a troop of desperadoes there
and in Spain, and with these wandered about as a leader of free-lances
in western Africa, where he had old commercial connections.

Consular Elections
Cicero Elected instead of Catalina

The party put forth all its energies for the struggle
of the election.  Crassus and Caesar staked their money--whether their
own or borrowed--and their connections to procure the consulship
for Catilina and Antonius; the comrades of Catilina strained every
nerve to bring to the helm the man who promised them the magistracies
and priesthoods, the palaces and country-estates of their opponents,
and above all deliverance from their debts, and who, they knew,
would keep his word.  The aristocracy was in great perplexity,
chiefly because it was not able even to start counter-candidates.
That such a candidate risked his head, was obvious; and the times
were past when the post of danger allured the burgess--now even
ambition was hushed in presence of fear.  Accordingly the nobility
contented themselves with making a feeble attempt to check
electioneering intrigues by issuing a new law respecting
the purchase of votes--which, however, was thwarted by the veto
of a tribune of the people--and with turning over their votes
to a candidate who, although not acceptable to them, was at least
inoffensive.  This was Marcus Cicero, notoriously a political
trimmer,(14) accustomed to flirt at times with the democrats,
at times with Pompeius, at times from a somewhat greater distance
with the aristocracy, and to lend his services as an advocate to every
influential man under impeachment without distinction of person
or party (he numbered even Catilina among his clients); belonging
properly to no party or--which was much the same--to the party
of material interests, which was dominant in the courts
and was pleased with the eloquent pleader and the courtly and witty
companion.  He had connections enough in the capital and the country
towns to have a chance alongside of the candidates proposed
by the democracy; and as the nobility, although with reluctance,
and the Pompeians voted for him, he was elected by a great
majority.  The two candidates of the democracy obtained almost
the same number of votes; but a few more fell to Antonius, whose family
was of more consideration than that of his fellow-candidate.
This accident frustrated the election of Catilina and saved Rome
from a second Cinna.  A little before this Piso had--it was said
at the instigation of his political and personal enemy Pompeius--
been put to death in Spain by his native escort.(15)  With the consul
Antonius alone nothing could be done; Cicero broke the loose bond
which attached him to the conspiracy, even before they entered
on their offices, inasmuch as he renounced his legal privilege
of having the consular provinces determined by lot, and handed over
to his deeply-embarrassed colleague the lucrative governorship
of Macedonia.  The essential preliminary conditions of this project
also had therefore miscarried.

New Projects of the Conspirators

Meanwhile the development of Oriental affairs grew daily
more perilous for the democracy.  The settlement of Syria rapidly
advanced; already invitations had been addressed to Pompeius
from Egypt to march thither and occupy the country for Rome;
they could not but be afraid that they would next hear of Pompeius
in person having taken possession of the valley of the Nile.
It was by this very apprehension probably that the attempt of Caesar
to get himself sent by the people to Egypt for the purpose of aiding
the king against his rebellious subjects(16) was called forth;
it failed, apparently, through the disinclination of great and small
to undertake anything whatever against the interest of Pompeius.
His return home, and the probable catastrophe which it involved,
were always drawing the nearer; often as the string of the bow
had been broken, it was necessary that there should be a fresh
attempt to bend it.  The city was in sullen ferment; frequent
conferences of the heads of the movement indicated that some
step was again contemplated.

The Servilian Agrarian Law

What they wished became manifest when the new tribunes
of the people entered on their office (10 Dec. 690), and one of them,
Publius Servilius Rullus, immediately proposed an agrarian law,
which was designed to procure for the leaders of the democrats
a position similar to that which Pompeius occupied in consequence
of 2the Gabinio-Manilian proposals.  The nominal object
was the founding of colonies in Italy.  The ground for these, however,
was not to be gained by dispossession; on the contrary all existing
private rights were guaranteed, and even the illegal occupations
of the most recent times(17) were converted into full property.
The leased Campanian domain alone was to be parcelled out
and colonized; in other cases the government was to acquire
the land destined for assignation by ordinary purchase.  To procure
the sums necessary for this purpose, the remaining Italian,
and more especially all the extra-Italian, domain-land was successively
to be brought to sale; which was understood to include the former
royal hunting domains in Macedonia, the Thracian Chersonese,
Bithynia, Pontus, Cyrene, and also the territories of the cities
acquired in full property by right of war in Spain, Africa, Sicily,
Hellas, and Cilicia.  Everything was likewise to be sold
which the state had acquired in moveable and immoveable property
since the year 666, and of which it had not previously disposed;
this was aimed chiefly at Egypt and Cyprus.  For the same purpose
all subject communities, with the exception of the towns with Latin
rights and the other free cities, were burdened with very high
rates of taxes and tithes.  Lastly there was likewise destined
for those purchases the produce of the new provincial revenues,
to be reckoned from 692, and the proceeds of the whole booty
not yet legally applied; which regulations had reference
to the new sources of taxation opened up by Pompeius in the east
and to the public moneys that might be found in the hands of Pompeius
and the heirs of Sulla.  For the execution of this measure decemvirs
with a special jurisdiction and special -imperium- were to be nominated,
who were to remain five years in office and to surround themselves
with 200 subalterns from the equestrian order; but in the election
of the decemvirs only those candidates who should personally
announce themselves were to be taken into account, and,
as in the elections of priests,(18) only seventeen tribes to be fixed
by lot out of the thirty-five were to make the election.  It needed
no great acuteness to discern that in this decemviral college it
was intended to create a power after the model of that of Pompeius,
only with somewhat less of a military and more of a democratic hue.
The jurisdiction was especially needed for the sake of deciding
the Egyptian question, the military power for the sake of arming
against Pompeius; the clause, which forbade the choice of an absent
person, excluded Pompeius; and the diminution of the tribes entitled
to vote as well as the manipulation of the balloting were designed
to facilitate the management of the election in accordance
with the views of the democracy.

But this attempt totally missed its aim.  The multitude, finding
it more agreeable to have their corn measured out to them
under the shade of Roman porticoes from the public magazines
than to cultivate it for themselves in the sweat of their brow,
received even the proposal in itself with complete indifference.
They soon came also to feel that Pompeius would never acquiesce
in such a resolution offensive to him in every respect, and that matters
could not stand well with a party which in its painful alarm
condescended to offers so extravagant.  Under such circumstances
it was not difficult for the government to frustrate the proposal;
the new consul Cicero perceived the opportunity of exhibiting
here too his talent for giving a finishing stroke to the beaten party;
even before the tribunes who stood ready exercised their veto,
the author himself withdrew his proposal (1 Jan. 691).
The democracy had gained nothing but the unpleasant lesson,
that the great multitude out of love or fear still continued
to adhere to Pompeius, and that every proposal was certain
to fail which the public perceived to be directed against him.

Preparations of the Anarchists in Etruria

Wearied by all this vain agitation and scheming without result,
Catilina determined to push the matter to a decision and make
an end of it once for all.  He took his measures in the course
of the summer to open the civil war.  Faesulae (Fiesole),
a very strong town situated in Etruria--which swarmed with
the impoverished and conspirators--and fifteen years before the centre
of the rising of Lepidus, was again selected as the headquarters
of the insurrection.  Thither were despatched the consignments
of money, for which especially the ladies of quality in the capital
implicated in the conspiracy furnished the means; there arms
and soldiers were collected; and there an old Sullan captain, Gaius
Manlius, as brave and as free from scruples of conscience
as was ever any soldier of fortune, took temporarily the chief command.
Similar though less extensive warlike preparations were made
at other points of Italy.  The Transpadanes were so excited
that they seemed only waiting for the signal to strike.  In the Bruttian
country, on the east coast of Italy, in Capua--wherever great
bodies of slaves were accumulated--a second slave insurrection
like that of Spartacus seemed on the eve of arising.  Even in the capital
there was something brewing; those who saw the haughty bearing
with which the summoned debtors appeared before the urban praetor,
could not but remember the scenes which had preceded the murder
of Asellio.(19)  The capitalists were in unutterable anxiety;
it seemed needful to enforce the prohibition of the export
of gold and silver, and to set a watch over the principal ports.
The plan of the conspirators was--on occasion of the consular
election for 692, for which Catilina had again announced himself--
summarily to put to death the consul conducting the election
as well as the inconvenient rival candidates, and to carry
the election of Catilina at any price; in case of necessity, even
to bring armed bands from Faesulae and the other rallying points
against the capital, and with their help to crush resistance.

Election of Catalina as Consul again Frustrated

Cicero, who was always quickly and completely informed by his
agents male and female of the transactions of the conspirators,
on the day fixed for the election (20 Oct.) denounced the conspiracy
in the full senate and in presence of its principal leaders.
Catilina did not condescend to deny it; he answered haughtily that,
if the election for consul should fall on him, the great headless
party would certainly no longer want a leader against the small
party led by wretched heads.  But as palpable evidences of the plot
were not before them, nothing farther was to be got from the timid
senate, except that it gave its previous sanction in the usual way
to the exceptional measures which the magistrates might deem
suitable (21 Oct.).  Thus the election battle approached--
on this occasion more a battle than an election; for Cicero too
had formed for himself an armed bodyguard out of the younger men,
more especially of the mercantile order; and it was his armed force
that covered and dominated the Campus Martius on the 28th October,
the day to which the election had been postponed by the senate.
The conspirators were not successful either in killing the consul
conducting the election, or in deciding the elections according
to their mind.

Outbreak of the Insurrection in Etruria
Repressive Measures of the Government

But meanwhile the civil war had begun.  On the 27th Oct.  Gaius
Manlius had planted at Faesulae the eagle round which the army
of the insurrection was to flock--it was one of the Marian eagles
from the Cimbrian war--and he had summoned the robbers
from the mountains as well as the country people to join him.
His proclamations, following the old traditions of the popular
party, demanded liberation from the oppressive load of debt
and a modification of the procedure in insolvency, which, if the amount
of the debt actually exceeded the estate, certainly still involved
in law the forfeiture of the debtor's freedom.  It seemed as though
the rabble of the capital, in coming forward as if it were
the legitimate successor of the old plebeian farmers and fighting
its battles under the glorious eagles of the Cimbrian war, wished
to cast a stain not only on the present but on the past of Rome.
This rising, however, remained isolated; at the other places
of rendezvous the conspiracy did not go beyond the collection of arms
and the institution of secret conferences, as resolute leaders
were everywhere wanting.  This was fortunate for the government;
for, although the impending civil war had been for a considerable time
openly announced, its own irresolution and the clumsiness
of the rusty machinery of administration had not allowed it to make
any military preparations whatever.  It was only now that the general
levy was called out, and superior officers were ordered to the several
regions of Italy that each might suppress the insurrection
in his own district; while at the same time the gladiatorial slaves
were ejected from the capital, and patrols were ordered on account
of the apprehension of incendiarism.

The Conspirators in Rome

Catilina was in a painful position.  According to his design
there should have been a simultaneous rising in the capital
and in Etruria on occasion of the consular elections; the failure
of the former and the outbreak of the latter movement endangered
his person as well as the whole success of his undertaking.
Now that his partisans at Faesulae had once risen in arms against
the government, he could no longer remain in the capital; and yet
not only did everything depend on his inducing the conspirators
of the capital now at least to strike quickly, but this had to be
done even before he left Rome--for he knew his helpmates too well
to rely on them for that matter.  The more considerable
of the conspirators--Publius Lentulus Sura consul in 683, afterwards
expelled from the senate and now, in order to get back into
the senate, praetor for the second time, and the two former praetors
Publius Autronius and Lucius Cassius--were incapable men; Lentulus
an ordinary aristocrat of big words and great pretensions, but slow
in conception and irresolute in action; Autronius distinguished
for nothing but his powerful screaming voice; while as to Lucius
Cassius no one comprehended how a man so corpulent and so simple
had fallen among the conspirators.  But Catilina could not venture
to place his abler partisans, such as the young senator Gaius
Cethegus and the equites Lucius Statilius and Publius Gabinius
Capito, at the head of the movement; for even among the conspirators
the traditional hierarchy of rank held its ground, and the very
anarchists thought that they should be unable to carry the day
unless a consular or at least a praetorian were at their head.
Therefore, however urgently the army of the insurrection might
long for its general, and however perilous it was for the latter
to remain longer at the seat of government after the outbreak
of the revolt, Catilina nevertheless resolved still to remain
for a time in Rome.  Accustomed to impose on his cowardly opponents
by his audacious insolence, he showed himself publicly in the Forum
and in the senate-house and replied to the threats which were
there addressed to him, that they should beware of pushing him
to extremities; that, if they should set the house on fire, he would
be compelled to extinguish the conflagration in ruins.  In reality
neither private persons nor officials ventured to lay hands
on the dangerous man; it was almost a matter of indifference
when a young nobleman brought him to trial on account of violence,
for long before the process could come to an end, the question could not
but be decided elsewhere.  But the projects of Catilina failed;
chiefly because the agents of the government had made their way
into the circle of the conspirators and kept it accurately informed
of every detail of the plot.  When, for instance, the conspirators
appeared before the strong Praeneste (1 Nov.), which they had hoped
to surprise by a -coup de main-, they found the inhabitants warned
and armed; and in a similar way everything miscarried.  Catilina
with all his temerity now found it advisable to fix his departure
for one of the ensuing days; but previously on his urgent exhortation,
at a last conference of the conspirators in the night between
the 6th and 7th Nov. it was resolved to assassinate the consul Cicero,
who was the principal director of the countermine, before the departure
of their leader, and, in order to obviate any treachery,
to carry the resolve at once into execution.  Early on the morning
of the 7th Nov., accordingly, the selected murderers knocked
at the house of the consul; but they found the guard reinforced
and themselves repulsed--on this occasion too the spies
of the government had outdone the conspirators.

Catalina Proceed to Etruria

On the following day (8 Nov.) Cicero convoked the senate.
Even now Catilina ventured to appear and to attempt a defence against
the indignant attacks of the consul, who unveiled before his face
the events of the last few days; but men no longer listened to him,
and in the neighbourhood of the place where he sat the benches became
empty.  He left the sitting, and proceeded, as he would doubtless
have done even apart from this incident, in accordance
with the agreement, to Etruria.  Here he proclaimed himself consul,
and assumed an attitude of waiting, in order to put his troops
in motion against the capital on the first announcement
of the outbreak of the insurrection there.  The government declared
the two leaders Catilina and Manlius, as well as those of their
comrades who should not have laid down their arms by a certain day,
to be outlaws, and called out new levies; but at the head
of the army destined against Catilina was placed the consul Gaius
Antonius, who was notoriously implicated in the conspiracy,
and with whose character it was wholly a matter of accident whether
he would lead his troops against Catilina or over to his side.
They seemed to have directly laid their plans towards converting
this Antonius into a second Lepidus.  As little were steps taken
against the leaders of the conspiracy who had remained behind
in the capital, although every one pointed the finger at them
and the insurrection in the capital was far from being abandoned
by the conspirators--on the contrary the plan of it had been settled
by Catilina himself before his departure from Rome.  A tribune
was to give the signal by calling an assembly of the people;
in the following night Cethegus was to despatch the consul Cicero;
Gabinius and Statilius were to set the city simultaneously
on fire at twelve places; and a communication was to be established
as speedily as possible with the army of Catilina, which should
have meanwhile advanced.  Had the urgent representations of Cethegus
borne fruit and had Lentulus, who after Catilina's departure
was placed at the head of the conspirators, resolved on rapidly
striking a blow, the conspiracy might even now have been successful.
But the conspirators were just as incapable and as cowardly as their
opponents; weeks elapsed and the matter came to no decisive issue.

Conviction and Arrest of the Conspirators in the Capital

At length the countermine brought about a decision.  Lentulus
in his tedious fashion, which sought to cover negligence in regard
to what was immediate and necessary by the projection of large
and distant plans, had entered into relations with the deputies
of a Celtic canton, the Allobroges, now present in Rome; had attempted
to implicate these--the representatives of a thoroughly disorganized
commonwealth and themselves deeply involved in debt--in the conspiracy;
and had given them on their departure messages and letters to his
confidants.  The Allobroges left Rome, but were arrested in the night
between 2nd and 3rd Dec. close to the gates by the Roman authorities,
and their papers were taken from them.  It was obvious
that the Allobrogian deputies had lent themselves as spies
to the Roman government, and had carried on the negotiations only
with a view to convey into the hands of the latter the desired proofs
implicating the ringleaders of the conspiracy.  On the following
morning orders were issued with the utmost secrecy by Cicero
for the arrest of the most dangerous leaders of the plot,
and executed in regard to Lentulus, Cethegus, Gabinius,
and Statilius, while some others escaped from seizure by flight.
The guilt of those arrested as well as of the fugitives
was completely evident.  Immediately after the arrest the letters seized,
the seals and handwriting of which the prisoners could not avoid
acknowledging, were laid before the senate, and the captives
and witnesses were heard; further confirmatory facts, deposits of arms
in the houses of the conspirators, threatening expressions
which they had employed, were presently forthcoming; the actual
subsistence of the conspiracy was fully and validly established,
and the most important documents were immediately on the suggestion
of Cicero published as news-sheets.

The indignation against the anarchist conspiracy was general.
Gladly would the oligarchic party have made use of the revelations
to settle accounts with the democracy generally and Caesar
in particular, but it was far too thoroughly broken to be able
to accomplish this, and to prepare for him the fate which it had
formerly prepared for the two Gracchi and Saturninus;
in this respect the matter went no farther than good will.
The multitude of the capital was especially shocked by the incendiary
schemes of the conspirators.  The merchants and the whole party
of material interests naturally perceived in this war of the debtors
against the creditors a struggle for their very existence; in tumultuous
excitement their youth crowded, with swords in their hands, round
the senate-house and brandished them against the open and secret
partisans of Catilina.  In fact, the conspiracy was for the moment
paralyzed; though its ultimate authors perhaps were still at liberty,
the whole staff entrusted with its execution were either captured
or had fled; the band assembled at Faesulae could not possibly
accomplish much, unless supported by an insurrection in the capital.

Discussions in the Senate as to the Execution of Those Arrested

In a tolerably well-ordered commonwealth the matter would now
have been politically at an end, and the military and the tribunals
would have undertaken the rest.  But in Rome matters had come
to such a pitch, that the government was not even in a position
to keep a couple of noblemen of note in safe custody.  The slaves
and freedmen of Lentulus and of the others arrested were stirring;
plans, it was alleged, were contrived to liberate them by force
from the private houses in which they were detained; there was no lack--
thanks to the anarchist doings of recent years--of ringleaders
in Rome who contracted at a certain rate for riots and deeds
of violence; Catilina, in fine, was informed of what had occurred,
and was near enough to attempt a coup de main with his bands.
How much of these rumours was true, we cannot tell; but there was ground
for apprehension, because, agreeably to the constitution, neither troops
nor even a respectable police force were at the command of the government
in the capital, and it was in reality left at the mercy of every gang
of banditti.  The idea was suggested of precluding all possible
attempts at liberation by the immediate execution of the prisoners.
Constitutionally, this was not possible.  According to the ancient
and sacred right of appeal, a sentence of death could only be
pronounced against the Roman burgess by the whole body of burgesses,
and not by any other authority; and, as the courts formed by the body
of burgesses had themselves become antiquated, a capital sentence
was no longer pronounced at all.  Cicero would gladly have rejected
the hazardous suggestion; indifferent as in itself the legal
question might be to the advocate, he knew well how very useful
it is to an advocate to be called liberal, and he showed
little desire to separate himself for ever from the democratic party
by shedding this blood.  But those around him, and particularly
his genteel wife, urged him to crown his services to his country
by this bold step; the consul like all cowards anxiously endeavouring
to avoid the appearance of cowardice, and yet trembling
before the formidable responsibility, in his distress
convoked the senate, and left it to that body to decide
as to the life or death of the four prisoners.  This indeed
had no meaning; for as the senate was constitutionally even less
entitled to act than the consul, all the responsibility still
devolved rightfully on the latter: but when was cowardice ever
consistent? Caesar made every exertion to save the prisoners,
and his speech, full of covert threats as to the future inevitable
vengeance of the democracy, made the deepest impression.  Although
all the consulars and the great majority of the senate had already
declared for the execution, most of them, with Cicero at their
head, seemed now once more inclined to keep within the limits
of the law.  But when Cato in pettifogging fashion brought
the champions of the milder view into suspicion of being accomplices
of the plot, and pointed to the preparations for liberating
the prisoners by a street-riot, he succeeded in throwing the waverers
into a fresh alarm, and in securing a majority for the immediate
execution of the transgressors.

Execution of the Catalinarians

The execution of the decree naturally devolved on the consul,
who had called it forth.  Late on the evening of the 5th of December
the prisoners were brought from their previous quarters, and conducted
across the market-place still densely crowded by men to the prison
in which criminals condemned to death were wont to be kept.
It was a subterranean vault, twelve feet deep, at the foot
of the Capitol, which formerly had served as a well-house.
The consul himself conducted Lentulus, and praetors the others,
all attended by strong guards; but the attempt at rescue,
which had been expected, did not take place.  No one knew whether
the prisoners were being conveyed to a secure place of custody
or to the scene of execution.  At the door of the prison they
were handed over to the -tresviri- who conducted the executions,
and were strangled in the subterranean vault by torchlight.  The consul
had waited before the door till the executions were accomplished,
and then with his loud well-known voice proclaimed over the Forum
to the multitude waiting in silence, "They are dead."  Till far
on in the night the crowds moved through the streets and exultingly
saluted the consul, to whom they believed that they owed
the security of their houses and their property.  The senate ordered
public festivals of gratitude, and the first men of the nobility,
Marcus Cato and Quintus Catulus, saluted the author of the sentence
of death with the name--now heard for the first time--of a "father
of his fatherland."

But it was a dreadful deed, and all the more dreadful that it
appeared to a whole people great and praiseworthy.  Never perhaps
has a commonwealth more lamentably declared itself bankrupt,
than did Rome through this resolution--adopted in cold blood
by the majority of the government and approved by public opinion--
to put to death in all haste a few political prisoners, who were
no doubt culpable according to the laws, but had not forfeited life;
because, forsooth, the security of the prisons was not to be
trusted, and there was no sufficient police.  It was the humorous
trait seldom wanting to a historical tragedy, that this act
of the most brutal tyranny had to be carried out by the most unstable
and timid of all Roman statesmen, and that the "first democratic
consul" was selected to destroy the palladium of the ancient
freedom of the Roman commonwealth, the right of -provocatio-.

Suppression of the Etruscan Insurrection

After the conspiracy had been thus stifled in the capital
even before it came to an outbreak, there remained the task of putting
an end to the insurrection in Etruria.  The army amounting to about
2000 men, which Catilina found on his arrival, had increased nearly
fivefold by the numerous recruits who flocked in, and already
formed two tolerably full legions, in which however only about
a fourth part of the men were sufficiently armed.  Catilina had
thrown himself with his force into the mountains and avoided
a battle with the troops of Antonius, with the view of completing
the organization of his bands and awaiting the outbreak
of the insurrection in Rome.  But the news of its failure broke up
the army of the insurgents; the mass of the less compromised thereupon
returned home.  The remnant of resolute, or rather desperate,
men that were left made an attempt to cut their way through
the Apennine passes into Gaul; but when the little band arrived
at the foot of the mountains near Pistoria (Pistoja), it found itself
here caught between two armies.  In front of it was the corps
of Quintus Metellus, which had come up from Ravenna and Ariminum
to occupy the northern slope of the Apennines; behind it was the army
of Antonius, who had at length yielded to the urgency of his officers
and agreed to a winter campaign.  Catilina was wedged in
on both sides, and his supplies came to an end; nothing was left
but to throw himself on the nearest foe, which was Antonius.
In a narrow valley enclosed by rocky mountains the conflict took place
between the insurgents and the troops of Antonius, which the latter,
in order not to be under the necessity of at least personally
performing execution on his former allies, had under a pretext
entrusted for this day to a brave officer who had grown gray
under arms, Marcus Petreius.  The superior strength of the government
army was of little account, owing to the nature of the field
of battle.  Both Catilina and Petreius placed their most trusty men
in the foremost ranks; quarter was neither given nor received.
The conflict lasted long, and many brave men fell on both sides;
Catilina, who before the beginning of the battle had sent back
his horse and those of all his officers, showed on this day
that nature had destined him for no ordinary things, and that he knew
at once how to command as a general and how to fight as a soldier.
At length Petreius with his guard broke the centre of the enemy,
and, after having overthrown this, attacked the two wings from within.
This decided the victory.  The corpses of the Catilinarians--there
were counted 3000 of them--covered, as it were in rank and file,
the ground where they had fought; the officers and the general
himself had, when all was lost, thrown themselves headlong
on the enemy and thus sought and found death (beginning of 692).
Antonius was on account of this victory stamped by the senate
with the title of Imperator, and new thanksgiving-festivals showed
that the government and the governed were beginning to become
accustomed to civil war.

Attitude of Crassus and Caesar toward the Anarchists

The anarchist plot had thus been suppressed in the capital as in Italy
with bloody violence; people were still reminded of it merely
by the criminal processes which in the Etruscan country towns
and in the capital thinned the ranks of those affiliated to the beaten
party, and by the large accessions to the robber-bands of Italy--
one of which, for instance, formed out of the remains of the armies
of Spartacus and Catilina, was destroyed by a military force in 694
in the territory of Thurii.  But it is important to keep in view
that the blow fell by no means merely on the anarchists proper,
who had conspired to set the capital on fire and had fought
at Pistoria, but on the whole democratic party.  That this party,
and in particular Crassus and Caesar, had a hand in the game
on the present occasion as well as in the plot of 688,
may be regarded--not in a juristic, but in a historical, point of view--
as an ascertained fact.  The circumstance, indeed, that Catulus
and the other heads of the senatorial party accused the leader
of the democrats of complicity in the anarchist plot,
and that the latter as senator spoke and voted against the brutal
judicial murder contemplated by the oligarchy, could only be urged
by partisan sophistry as any valid proof of his participation
in the plans of Catilina.  But a series of other facts is of more weight.
According to express and irrefragable testimonies it was especially
Crassus and Caesar that supported the candidature of Catilina
for the consulship.  When Caesar in 690 brought the executioners
of Sulla before the commission for murder(20) he allowed the rest
to be condemned, but the most guilty and infamous of all, Catilina,
to be acquitted.  In the revelations of the 3rd of December,
it is true, Cicero did not include among the names of the conspirators
of whom he had information those of the two influential men;
but it is notorious that the informers denounced not merely those
against whom subsequently investigation was directed, but "many innocent"
persons besides, whom the consul Cicero thought proper to erase
from the list; and in later years, when he had no reason to disguise
the truth, he expressly named Caesar among the accomplices.  An indirect
but very intelligible inculpation is implied also in the circumstance,
that of the four persons arrested on the 3rd of December the two least
dangerous, Statilius and Gabinius, were handed over to be guarded
by the senators Caesar and Crassus; it was manifestly intended that these
should either, if they allowed them to escape, be compromised in the view
of public opinion as accessories, or, if they really detained them,
be compromised in the view of their fellow-conspirators as renegades.

The following scene which occurred in the senate shows
significantlyhow matters stood.  Immediately after the arrest
of Lentulus and his comrades, a messenger despatched by the conspirators
in the capital to Catilina was seized by the agents of the government,
and, after having been assured of impunity, was induced
to make a comprehensive confession in a full meeting of the senate.
But when he came to the critical portions of his confession
and in particular named Crassus as having commissioned him,
he was interrupted by the senators, and on the suggestion
of Cicero it was resolved to cancel the whole statement without
farther inquiry, but to imprison its author notwithstanding
the amnesty assured to him, until such time as he should have
not merely retracted the statement, but should have also confessed
who had instigated him to give such false testimony! Here it is
abundantly clear, not merely that that man had a very accurate
knowledge of the state of matters who, when summoned to make
an attack upon Crassus, replied that he had no desire to provoke
the bull of the herd, but also that the majority of the senate
with Cicero at their head were agreed in not permitting the revelations
to go beyond a certain limit.  The public was not so nice; the young men,
who had taken up arms to ward off the incendiaries, were exasperated
against no one so much as against Caesar, on the 5th of December,
when he left the senate, they pointed their swords at his breast
and even now he narrowly escaped with his life on the same spot
where the fatal blow fell on him seventeen years afterwards;
he did not again for a considerable time enter the senate-house.
Any one who impartially considers the course of the conspiracy
will not be able to resist the suspicion that during all this time
Catilina was backed by more powerful men, who--relying on the want
of a legally complete chain of evidence and on the lukewarmness
and cowardice of the majority of the senate, which was but half-
initiated and greedily caught at any pretext for inaction--knew how
to hinder any serious interference with the conspiracy on the part
of the authorities, to procure free departure for the chief
of the insurgents, and even so to manage the declaration of war
and the sending of troops against the insurrection that it was almost
equivalent to the sending of an auxiliary army.  While the course
of the events themselves thus testifies that the threads
of the Catilinarian plot reached far higher than Lentulus and Catilina,
it deserves also to be noticed, that at a much later period,
when Caesar had got to the head of the state, he was in the closest
alliance with the only Catilinarian still surviving, Publius Sittius
the leader of the Mauretanian free bands, and that he modified
the law of debt quite in the sense that the proclamations
of Manlius demanded.

All these pieces of evidence speak clearly enough; but, even were
it not so, the desperate position of the democracy in presence
of the military power--which since the Gabinio-Manilian laws assumed
by its side an attitude more threatening than ever--renders it
almost a certainty that, as usually happens in such cases,
it sought a last resource in secret plots and in alliance
with anarchy.  The circumstances were very similar to those
of the Cinnan times.  While in the east Pompeius occupied a position
nearly such as Sulla then did, Crassus and Caesar sought to raise
over against him a power in Italy like that which Marius and Cinna
had possessed, with the view of employing it if possible better
than they had done.  The way to this result lay once more through
terrorism and anarchy, and to pave that way Catilina was certainly
the fitting man.  Naturally the more reputable leaders
of the democracy kept themselves as far as possible in the background,
and left to their unclean associates the execution of the unclean
work, the political results of which they hoped afterwards
to appropriate.  Still more naturally, when the enterprise had failed,
the partners of higher position applied every effort to conceal
their participation in it.  And at a later period, when the former
conspirator had himself become the target of political plots,
the veil was for that very reason drawn only the more closely
over those darker years in the life of the great man, and even
special apologies for him were written with that very object.(21)

Total Destruction of the Democratic Party

For five years Pompeius stood at the head of his armies and fleets
in the east; for five years the democracy at home conspired
to overthrow him.  The result was discouraging.  With unspeakable
exertions they had not merely attained nothing, but had suffered
morally as well as materially enormous loss.  Even the coalition
of 683 could not but be for democrats of pure water a scandal,
although the democracy at that time only coalesced with two
distinguished men of the opposite party and bound these
to its programme.

But now the democratic party had made common cause with a band
of murderers and bankrupts, who were almost all likewise deserters
from the camp of the aristocracy; and had at least for the time
being accepted their programme, that is to say, the terrorism
of Cinna.  The party of material interests, one of the chief elements
of the coalition of 683, was thereby estranged from the democracy,
and driven into the arms of the Optimates in the first instance,
or of any power at all which would and could give protection against
anarchy.  Even the multitude of the capital, who, although having
no objection to a street-riot, found it inconvenient to have
their houses set on fire over their heads, became in some measure
alarmed.  It is remarkable that in this very year (691) the full
re-establishment of the Sempronian corn-largesses took place,
and was effected by the senate on the proposal of Cato.  The league
of the democratic leaders with anarchy had obviously created a breach
between the former and the burgesses of the city; and the oligarchy
sought, not without at least momentary success, to enlarge
this chasm and to draw over the masses to their side.  Lastly,
Gnaeus Pompeius had been partly warned, partly exasperated,
by all these cabals; after all that had occurred, and after the democracy
had itself virtually torn asunder the ties which connected it
with Pompeius, it could no longer with propriety make the request--
which in 684 had had a certain amount of reason on its side--
that he should not himself destroy with the sword the democratic power
which he had raised, and which had raised him.

Thus the democracy was disgraced and weakened; but above all it had
become ridiculous through the merciless exposure of its perplexity
and weakness.  Where the humiliation of the overthrown government
and similar matters of little moment were concerned, it was great
and potent; but every one of its attempts to attain a real
political success had proved a downright failure.  Its relation
to Pompeius was as false as pitiful.  While it was loading him
with panegyrics and demonstrations of homage, it was concocting
against him one intrigue after another; and one after another,
like soap-bubbles, they burst of themselves.  The general of the east
and of the seas, far from standing on his defence against them,
appeared not even to observe all the busy agitation, and to obtain
his victories over the democracy as Herakles gained his over
the Pygmies, without being himself aware of it.  The attempt to kindle
civil war had miserably failed; if the anarchist section
had at least displayed some energy, the pure democracy, while knowing
doubtless how to hire conspirators, had not known how to lead
them or to save them or to die with them.  Even the old languid
oligarchy, strengthened by the masses passing over to it
from the ranks of the democracy and above all by the--in this affair
unmistakeable--identity of its interests and those of Pompeius,
had been enabled to suppress this attempt at revolution and thereby
to achieve yet a last victory over the democracy.  Meanwhile king
Mithradates was dead, Asia Minor and Syria were regulated,
and the return of Pompeius to Italy might be every moment expected.
The decision was not far off; but was there in fact still room
to speak of a decision between the general who returned more famous
and mightier than ever, and the democracy humbled beyond parallel
and utterly powerless? Crassus prepared to embark his family
and his gold and to seek an asylum somewhere in the east;
and even so elastic and so energetic a nature as that of Caesar seemed
on the point of giving up the game as lost.  In this year (691)
occurred his candidature for the place of -pontifex maximus-;(22)
when he left his dwelling on the morning of the election,
he declared that, if he should fail in this also, he would
never again cross the threshold of his house.




Chapter VI

Retirement of Pompeius and Coalition of the Pretenders

Pompeius in the East

When Pompeius, after having transacted the affairs committed
to his charge, again turned his eyes homeward, he found for the second
time the diadem at his feet.  For long the development of the Roman
commonwealth had been tending towards such a catastrophe;
it was evident to every unbiassed observer, and had been remarked
a thousand times, that, if the rule of the aristocracy
should be brought to an end, monarchy was inevitable.  The senate
had now been overthrown at once by the civic liberal opposition
and by the power of the soldiery; the only question remaining
was to settle the persons, names, and forms for the new order of things;
and these were already clearly enough indicated in the partly democratic,
partly military elements of the revolution.  The events of the last
five years had set, as it were, the final seal on this impending
transformation of the commonwealth.  In the newly-erected
Asiatic provinces, which gave regal honours to their organizer
as the successor of Alexander the Great, and already received
his favoured freedmen like princes, Pompeius had laid the foundations
of his dominion, and found at once the treasures, the army, and the halo
of glory which the future prince of the Roman state required.
The anarchist conspiracy, moreover, in the capital, and the civil
war connected with it, had made it palpably clear to every one
who studied political or even merely material interests,
that a government without authority and without military power,
such as that of the senate, exposed the state to the equally ludicrous
and formidable tyranny of political sharpers, and that a change
of constitution, which should connect the military power more closely
with the government, was an indispensable necessity if social order
was to be maintained.  So the ruler had arisen in the east,
the throne had been erected in Italy; to all appearance the year 692
was the last of the republic, the first of monarchy.

The Opponents of the Future Monarchy

This goal, it is true, was not to be reached without a struggle.
The constitution, which had endured for five hundred years,
and under which the insignificant town on the Tiber had risen
to unprecedented greatness and glory, had sunk its roots into the soil
to a depth beyond human ken, and no one could at all calculate
to what extent the attempt to overthrow it would penetrate
and convulse civil society.  Several rivals had been outrun by Pompeius
in the race towards the great goal, but had not been wholly set
aside.  It was not at all beyond reach of calculation that all
these elements might combine to overthrow the new holder of power,
and that Pompeius might find Quintus Catulus and Marcus Cato united
in opposition to him with Marcus Crassus, Gaius Caesar, and Titus
Labienus.  But the inevitable and undoubtedly serious struggle
could not well be undertaken under circumstances more favourable.
It was in a high degree probable that, under the fresh impression
of the Catilinarian revolt, a rule which promised order
and security, although at the price of freedom, would receive
the submission of the whole middle party--embracing especially
the merchants who concerned themselves only about their material
interests, but including also a great part of the aristocracy,
which, disorganized in itself and politically hopeless, had to rest
content with securing for itself riches, rank, and influence
by a timely compromise with the prince; perhaps even a portion
of the democracy, so sorely smitten by the recent blows, might submit
to hope for the realization of a portion of its demands
from a military chief raised to power by itself.  But, whatever might be
the position of party-relations, of what importance, in the first
instance at least, were the parties in Italy at all in presence
of Pompeius and his victorious army?  Twenty years previously Sulla,
after having concluded a temporary peace with Mithradates,
had with his five legions been able to carry a restoration
runningcounter to the natural development of things in the face
of the whole liberal party, which had been arming en masse for years,
from the moderate aristocrats and the liberal mercantile class down
to the anarchists.  The task of Pompeius was far less difficult.
He returned, after having fully and conscientiously performed
his different functions by sea and land.  He might expect to encounter
no other serious opposition save that of the various extreme
parties, each of which by itself could do nothing, and which even
when leagued together were no more than a coalition of factions
still vehemently hostile to each other and inwardly at thorough
variance.  Completely unarmed, they were without a military force
and without a head, without organization in Italy, without support
in the provinces, above all, without a general; there was in their
ranks hardly a soldier of note--to say nothing of an officer--who
could have ventured to call forth the burgesses to a conflict
with Pompeius.  The circumstance might further be taken into account,
that the volcano of revolution, which had been now incessantly
blazing for seventy years and feeding on its own flame, was visibly
burning out and verging of itself to extinction.  It was very doubtful
whether the attempt to arm the Italians for party interests
would now succeed, as it had succeeded with Cinna and Carbo.
If Pompeius exerted himself, how could he fail to effect
a revolution of the state, which was chalked out by a certain
necessity of nature in the organic development
of the Roman commonwealth?

Mission of Nepos to Rome

Pompeius had seized the right moment, when he undertook his mission
to the east; he seemed desirous to go forward.  In the autumn
of 691, Quintus Metellus Nepos arrived from the camp of Pompeius
in the capital, and came forward as a candidate for the tribuneship,
with the express design of employing that position to procure
for Pompeius the consulship for the year 693 and more immediately,
by special decree of the people, the conduct of the war against
Catilina.  The excitement in Rome was great.  It was not
to be doubted that Nepos was acting under the direct or indirect
commission of Pompeius; the desire of Pompeius to appear in Italy
as general at the head of his Asiatic legions, and to administer
simultaneously the supreme military and the supreme civil power
there, was conceived to be a farther step on the way to the throne,
and the mission of Nepos a semi-official proclamation of the monarchy.

Pompeius in Relation to the Parties

Everything turned on the attitude which the two great political parties
should assume towards these overtures; their future position
and the future of the nation depended on this. But the reception
which Nepos met with was itself in its turn determined
by the then existing relation of the parties to Pompeius, which was
of a very peculiar kind.  Pompeius had gone to the east as general
of the democracy.  He had reason enough to be discontented
with Caesar and his adherents, but no open rupture had taken place.
It is probable that Pompeius, who was at a great distance and occupied
with other things, and who besides was wholly destitute of the gift
of calculating his political bearings, by no means saw through,
at least at that time, the extent and mutual connection
of the democratic intrigues contrived against him; perhaps even
in his haughty and shortsighted manner he had a certain pride
in ignoring these underground proceedings.  Then there came the fact,
which with a character of the type of Pompeius had much weight,
that the democracy never lost sight of outward respect for the great man,
and even now (691) unsolicited (as he preferred it so) had granted
to him by a special decree of the people unprecedented honours
and decorations.(1)  But, even if all this had not been the case,
it lay in Pompeius' own well-understood interest to continue
his adherence, at least outwardly, to the popular party; democracy
and monarchy stand so closely related that Pompeius, in aspiring
to the crown, could scarcely do otherwise than call himself, as hitherto,
the champion of popular rights.  While personal and political
reasons, therefore, co-operated to keep Pompeius and the leaders
of the democracy, despite of all that had taken place, in their
previous connection, nothing was done on the opposite side to fill
up the chasm which separated him since his desertion to the camp
of the democracy from his Sullan partisans.  His personal quarrel
with Metellus and Lucullus transferred itself to their extensive
and influential coteries.  A paltry opposition of the senate--
but, to a character of so paltry a mould, all the more exasperating
by reason of its very paltriness--had attended him through his whole
career as a general.  He felt it keenly, that the senate had not taken
the smallest step to honour the extraordinary man according to
his desert, that is, by extraordinary means.  Lastly, it is not
to be forgotten, that the aristocracy was just then intoxicated
by its recent victory and the democracy deeply humbled,
and that the aristocracy was led by the pedantically stiff
and half-witless Cato, and the democracy by the supple master
of intrigue, Caesar.

Rupture between Pompeius and the Aristocracy

Such was the state of parties amidst which the emissary sent
by Pompeius appeared.  The aristocracy not only regarded the proposals
which he announced in favour of Pompeius as a declaration of war
against the existing constitution, but treated them openly as such,
and took not the slightest pains to conceal their alarm and their
indignation.  With the express design of combating these proposals,
Marcus Cato had himself elected as tribune of the people
along with Nepos, and abruptly repelled the repeated attempts of Pompeius
to approach him personally.  Nepos naturally after this found himself
under no inducement to spare the aristocracy, but attached himself
the more readily to the democrats, when these, pliant as ever,
submitted to what was inevitable and chose freely to concede
the office of general in Italy as well as the consulate
rather than let the concession be wrung from them by force of arms.
The cordial understanding soon showed itself.  Nepos publicly accepted
(Dec. 691) the democratic view of the executions recently decreed
by the majority of the senate, as unconstitutional judicial murders;
and that his lord and master looked on them in no other light,
was shown by his significant silence respecting the voluminous
vindication of them which Cicero had sent to him.  On the other
hand, the first act with which Caesar began his praetorship
was to call Quintus Catulus to account for the moneys alleged
to have been embezzled by him at the rebuilding of the Capitoline temple,
and to transfer the completion of the temple to Pompeius.  This was
a masterstroke.  Catulus had already been building at the temple
for fifteen years, and seemed very much disposed to die as he had lived
superintendent of the Capitoline buildings; an attack on this abuse
of a public commission--an abuse covered only by the reputation
of the noble commissioner--was in reality entirely justified
and in a high degree popular.  But when the prospect was simultaneously
opened up to Pompeius of being allowed to delete the name of Catulus
and engrave his own on this proudest spot of the first city
of the globe, there was offered to him the very thing which most
of all delighted him and did no harm to the democracy--abundant
but empty honour; while at the same time the aristocracy, which could
not possibly allow its best man to fall, was brought into the most
disagreeable collision with Pompeius.

Meanwhile Nepos had brought his proposals concerning Pompeius
before the burgesses.  On the day of voting Cato and his friend
and colleague, Quintus Minucius, interposed their veto.  When Nepos
did not regard this and continued the reading out, a formal conflict
took place; Cato and Minucius threw themselves on their colleague
and forced him to stop; an armed band liberated him, and drove
the aristocratic section from the Forum; but Cato and Minucius
returned, now supported likewise by armed bands, and ultimately
maintained the field of battle for the government.  Encouraged
by this victory of their bands over those of their antagonist,
the senate suspended the tribune Nepos as well as the praetor Caesar,
who had vigorously supported him in the bringing in of the law,
from their offices; their deposition, which was proposed in the senate,
was prevented by Cato, more, doubtless, because it was
unconstitutional than because it was injudicious.  Caesar did
not regard the decree, and continued his official functions till
the senate used violence against him.  As soon as this was known,
the multitude appeared before his house and placed itself at his
disposal; it was to depend solely on him whether the struggle
in the streets should begin, or whether at least the proposals made
by Metellus should now be resumed and the military command in Italy
desired by Pompeius should be procured for him; but this was not
in Caesar's interest, and so he induced the crowds to disperse,
whereupon the senate recalled the penalty decreed against him.
Nepos himself had, immediately after his suspension, left
the city and embarked for Asia, in order to report to Pompeius
the result of his mission.

Retirement of Pompeius

Pompeius had every reason to be content with the turn which things
had taken.  The way to the throne now lay necessarily through civil
war; and he owed it to Cato's incorrigible perversity that he could
begin this war with good reason.  After the illegal condemnation
of the adherents of Catilina, after the unparalleled acts of violence
against the tribune of the people Metellus, Pompeius might wage war
at once as defender of the two palladia of Roman public freedom--
the right of appeal and the inviolability of the tribunate
of the people--against the aristocracy, and as champion of the party
of order against the Catilinarian band.  It seemed almost impossible
that Pompeius should neglect this opportunity and with his eyes
open put himself a second time into the painful position, in which
the dismissal of his army in 684 had placed him, and from which
only the Gabinian law had released him.  But near as seemed
the opportunity of placing the white chaplet around his brow,
and much as his own soul longed after it, when the question of action
presented itself, his heart and his hand once more failed him.
This man, altogether ordinary in every respect excepting only
his pretensions, would doubtless gladly have placed himself beyond
the law, if only he could have done so without forsaking legal ground.
His very lingering in Asia betrayed a misgiving of this sort.
He might, had he wished, have very well arrived in January 692
with his fleet and army at the port of Brundisium, and have received
Nepos there.  His tarrying the whole winter of 691-692 in Asia had
proximately the injurious consequence, that the aristocracy,
which of course accelerated the campaign against Catilina as it best
could, had meanwhile got rid of his bands, and had thus set aside
the most feasible pretext for keeping together the Asiatic legions
in Italy.  For a man of the type of Pompeius, who for want of faith
in himself and in his star timidly clung in public life to formal
right, and with whom the pretext was nearly of as much importance
as the motive, this circumstance was of serious weight.  He probably
said to himself, moreover, that, even if he dismissed his army,
he did not let it wholly out of his hand, and could in case
of need still raise a force ready for battle sooner at any rate
than any other party-chief; that the democracy was waiting
in submissive attitude for his signal, and that he could deal
with the refractory senate even without soldiers; and such further
considerations as suggested themselves, in which there was exactly
enough of truth to make them appear plausible to one who wished
to deceive himself.  Once more the very peculiar temperament
of Pompeius naturally turned the scale.  He was one of those men
who are capable it may be of a crime, but not of insubordination;
in a good as in a bad sense, he was thoroughly a soldier.  Men of mark
respect the law as a moral necessity, ordinary men as a traditional
everyday rule; for this very reason military discipline, in which
more than anywhere else law takes the form of habit, fetters every
man not entirely self-reliant as with a magic spell.  It has often
been observed that the soldier, even where he has determined
to refuse obedience to those set over him, involuntarily
when that obedience is demanded resumes his place in the ranks.
It was this feeling that made Lafayette and Dumouriez hesitate
at the last moment before the breach of faith and break down;
and to this too Pompeius succumbed.

In the autumn of 692 Pompeius embarked for Italy.  While in the capital
all was being prepared for receiving the new monarch, news came
that Pompeius, when barely landed at Brundisium, had broken up
his legions and with a small escort had entered on his journey
to the capital.  If it is a piece of good fortune to gain a crown
without trouble, fortune never did more for mortal than it did
for Pompeius; but on those who lack courage the gods lavish every
favour and every gift in vain.

Pompeius without Influence

The parties breathed freely.  For the second time Pompeius had
abdicated; his already-vanquished competitors might once more begin
the race--in which doubtless the strangest thing was, that Pompeius
was again a rival runner.  In January 693 he came to Rome.
His position was an awkward one and vacillated with so much uncertainty
between the parties, that people gave him the nickname of Gnaeus
Cicero.  He had in fact lost favour with all.  The anarchists saw
in him an adversary, the democrats an inconvenient friend, Marcus
Crassus a rival, the wealthy class an untrustworthy protector,
the aristocracy a declared foe.(2)  He was still indeed the most
powerful man in the state; his military adherents scattered through
all Italy, his influence in the provinces, particularly those
of the east, his military fame, his enormous riches gave him a weight
such as no other possessed; but instead of the enthusiastic
reception on which he had counted, the reception which he met
with was more than cool, and still cooler was the treatment given
to the demands which he presented.  He requested for himself,
as he had already caused to be announced by Nepos, a second consulship;
demanding also, of course, a confirmation of the arrangements made
by him in the east and a fulfilment of the promise which he had
given to his soldiers to furnish them with lands.  Against these
demands a systematic opposition arose in the senate, the chief
elements of which were furnished by the personal exasperation
of Lucullus and Metellus Creticus, the old resentment of Crassus,
and the conscientious folly of Cato.  The desired second consulship
was at once and bluntly refused.  The very first request
which the returning general addressed to the senate, that the election
of the consuls for 693 might be put off till after his entry
into the capital, had been rejected; much less was there any likelihood
of obtaining from the senate the necessary dispensation from the law
of Sulla as to re-election.(3)  As to the arrangements which
he had made in the eastern provinces, Pompeius naturally asked
their confirmation as a whole; Lucullus carried a proposal
thatevery ordinance should be separately discussed and voted upon,
which opened the door for endless annoyances and a multitude of defeats
in detail.  The promise of a grant of land to the soldiers
of the Asiatic army was ratified indeed in general by the senate,
but was at the same time extended to the Cretan legions of Metellus;
and--what was worse--it was not executed, because the public chest
was empty and the senate was not disposed to meddle with the domains
for this purpose.  Pompeius, in despair of mastering the persistent
and spiteful opposition of the senate, turned to the burgesses.
But he understood still less how to conduct his movements
on this field.  The democratic leaders, although they did not
openly oppose him, had no cause at all to make his interests their own,
and so kept aloof.  Pompeius' own instruments--such as the consuls
elected by his influence and partly by his money, Marcus Pupius Piso
for 693 and Lucius Afranius for 694--showed themselves unskilful
and useless.  When at length the assignation of land for the veterans
of Pompeius was submitted to the burgesses by the tribune
of the people Lucius Flavius in the form of a general agrarian law,
the proposal, not supported by the democrats, openly combated
by the aristocrats, was left in a minority (beg. of 694).  The exalted
general now sued almost humbly for the favour of the masses,
for it was on his instigation that the Italian tolls were abolished
by a law introduced by the praetor Metellus Nepos (694).  But he played
the demagogue without skill and without success; his reputation
suffered from it, and he did not obtain what he desired.  He had
completely run himself into a noose.  One of his opponents summed
up his political position at that time by saying that he had
endeavoured "to conserve by silence his embroidered triumphal
mantle."  In fact nothing was left for him but to fret.

Rise of Caesar

Then a new combination offered itself.  The leader
of the democratic party had actively employed in his own interest
the political calm which had immediately followed on the retirement
of the previous holder of power.  When Pompeius returned from Asia,
Caesar had been little more than what Catilina was--the chief
of a political party which had dwindled almost into a club
of conspirators, and a bankrupt.  But since that event he had,
after administering the praetorship (692), been invested
with the governorship of Further Spain, and thereby had found means
partly to rid himself of his debts, partly to lay the foundation
for his military repute.  His old friend and ally Crassus had been
induced by the hope of finding the support against Pompeius,
which he had lost in Piso,(4) once more in Caesar, to relieve him
even before his departure to the province from the most oppressive
portion of his load of debt.  He himself had energetically employed
his brief sojourn there.  Returning from Spain in the year 694
with filled chests and as Imperator with well-founded claims
to a triumph, he came forward for the following year as a candidate
for the consulship; for the sake of which, as the senate refused
him permission to announce himself as a candidate for the consular
election in absence, he without hesitation abandoned the honour
of the triumph.  For years the democracy had striven to raise
one of its partisans to the possession of the supreme magistracy,
that by way of this bridge it might attain a military power of its own.
It had long been clear to discerning men of all shades that the strife
of parties could not be settled by civil conflict, but only
by military power; but the course of the coalition between
the democracy and the powerful military chiefs, through which the rule
of the senate had been terminated, showed with inexorable clearness
that every such alliance ultimately issued in a subordination
of the civil under the military elements, and that the popular party,
if it would really rule, must not ally itself with generals
properly foreign and even hostile to it, but must make generals
of its own leaders themselves.  The attempts made with this view
to carry the election of Catilina as consul, and to gain a military
support in Spain or Egypt, had failed; now a possibility presented
itself of procuring for their most important man the consulship
and the consular province in the usual constitutional way,
and of rendering themselves independent of their dubious and dangerous
ally Pompeius by the establishment, if we may so speak, of a home
power in their own democratic household.

Second Coalition of Pompeius, Crassus, and Caesar

But the more the democracy could not but desire to open up
for itself this path, which offered not so much the most favourable
as the only prospect of real successes, the more certainly it
might reckon on the resolute resistance of its political opponents.
Everything depended on whom it found opposed to it in this matter.
The aristocracy isolated was not formidable; but it had just been
rendered evident in the Catilinarian affair that it could certainly
still exert some influence, where it was more or less openly
supported by the men of material interests and by the adherents
of Pompeius.  It had several times frustrated Catilina's candidature
for the consulship, and that it would attempt the like against
Caesar was sufficiently certain.  But, even though Caesar should
perhaps be chosen in spite of it, his election alone did not suffice.
He needed at least some years of undisturbed working out of Italy,
in order to gain a firm military position; and the nobility
assuredly would leave no means untried to thwart his plans
during this time of preparation.  The idea naturally occurred,
whether the aristocracy might not be again successfully isolated
as in 683-684, and an alliance firmly based on mutual advantage might
not be established between the democrats with their ally Crassus
on the one side and Pompeius and the great capitalists on the other.
For Pompeius such a coalition was certainly a political suicide.
His weight hitherto in the state rested on the fact, that he was
the only party-leader who at the same time disposed of legions--
which, though now dissolved, were still in a certain sense
at his disposal.  The plan of the democracy was directed
to the very object of depriving him of this preponderance,
and of placing by his side in their own chief a military rival.
Never could he consent to this, and least of all personally help
to a post of supreme command a man like Caesar, who already
as a mere political agitator had given him trouble enough
and had just furnished the most brilliant proofs also of military
capacity in Spain.  But on the other hand, in consequence
of the cavilling opposition of the senate and the indifference
of the multitude to Pompeius and Pompeius' wishes, his position,
particularly with reference to his old soldiers, had become so painful
and so humiliating, that people might well expect from his character
to gain him for such a coalition at the price of releasing him
from that disagreeable situation.  And as to the so-called
equestrian party, it was to be found on whatever side the power lay;
and as a matter of course it would not let itself be long waited for,
if it saw Pompeius and the democracy combining anew in earnest.
It happened moreover, that on account of Cato's severity--
otherwise very laudable--towards the lessees of the taxes,
the great capitalists were just at this time once more
at vehement variance with the senate.

Change in the Position of Caesar

So the second coalition was concluded in the summer of 694.
Caesar was assured of the consulship for the following year
and a governorship in due course; to Pompeius was promised
the ratification of his arrangements made in the east,
and an assignation of lands for the soldiers of the Asiatic army;
to the equites Caesar likewise promised to procure for them
by means of the burgesses what the senate had refused; Crassus
in fine--the inevitable--was allowed at least to join the league,
although without obtaining definite promises for an accession
which he could not refuse.  It was exactly the same elements,
and indeed the same persons, who concluded the league with one another
in the autumn of 683 and in the summer of 694; but how entirely different
was the position of the parties then and now!  Then the democracy
was nothing but a political party, while its allies were victorious
generals at the head of their armies; now the leader of the democracy
was himself an Imperator crowned with victory and full
of magnificent military schemes, while his allies were retired
generals without any army.  Then the democracy conquered
in questions of principle, and in return for that victory conceded
the highest offices of state to its two confederates; now it had
become more practical and grasped the supreme civil and military
power for itself, while concessions were made to its allies only
in subordinate points and, significantly enough, not even the old
demand of Pompeius for a second consulship was attended to.  Then
the democracy sacrificed itself to its allies; now these had
to entrust themselves to it.  All the circumstances were completely
changed, most of all, however, the character of the democracy
itself.  No doubt it had, ever since it existed at all,
contained at its very core a monarchic element; but the ideal
of a constitution, which floated in more or less clear outline before
its best intellects, was always that of a civil commonwealth,
a Periclean organization of the state, in which the power
of the prince rested on the fact that he represented the burgesses
in the noblest and most accomplished manner, and the most accomplished
and noblest part of the burgesses recognized him as the man in whom
they thoroughly confided.  Caesar too set out with such views;
but they were simply ideals, which might have some influence
on realities, but could not be directly realized.  Neither the simple
civil power, as Gaius Gracchus possessed it, nor the arming
of the democratic party, such as Cinna though in a very inadequate
fashion had attempted, was able to maintain a permanent superiority
in the Roman commonwealth; the military machine fighting not for a party
but for a general, the rude force of the condottieri--after having
first appeared on the stage in the service of the restoration--soon
showed itself absolutely superior to all political parties.  Caesar
could not but acquire a conviction of this amidst the practical
workings of party, and accordingly he matured the momentous
resolution of making this military machine itself serviceable
to his ideals, and of erecting such a commonwealth, as he had
in his view, by the power of condottieri.  With this design
he concluded in 683 the league with the generals of the opposite party,
which, notwithstanding that they had accepted the democratic programme,
yet brought the democracy and Caesar himself to the brink
of destruction.  With the same design he himself came forward eleven
years afterwards as a condottiere.  It was done in both cases
with a certain naivete--with good faith in the possibility
of his being able to found a free commonwealth, if not by the swords
of others, at any rate by his own.  We perceive without difficulty
that this faith was fallacious, and that no one takes an evil spirit
into his service without becoming himself enslaved to it;
but the greatest men are not those who err the least.
If we still after so many centuries bow in reverence before what
Caesar willed and did, it is not because he desired and gained
a crown (to do which is, abstractly, as little of a great thing
as the crown itself) but because his mighty ideal--of a free commonwealth
under one ruler--never forsook him, and preserved him even when monarch
from sinking into vulgar royalty.

Caesar Consul

The election of Caesar as consul for 695 was carried without
difficulty by the united parties.  The aristocracy had to rest
content with giving to him--by means of a bribery, for which
the whole order of lords contributed the funds, and which excited
surprise even in that period of deepest corruption--a colleague
in the person of Marcus Bibulus, whose narrow-minded obstinacy
was regarded in their circles as conservative energy,
and whose good intentions at least were not at fault if the genteel
lords did not get a fit return for their patriotic expenditure.

Caesar's Agrarian Law

As consul Caesar first submitted to discussion the requests of his
confederates, among which the assignation of land to the veterans
of the Asiatic army was by far the most important.  The agrarian
law projected for this purpose by Caesar adhered in general
to the principles set forth in the project of law, which was introduced
in the previous year at the suggestion of Pompeius but not carried.(5)
There was destined for distribution only the Italian domain-land,
that is to say, substantially, the territory of Capua, and, if this
should not suffice, other Italian estates were to be purchased
out of the revenue of the new eastern provinces at the taxable value
recorded in the censorial rolls; all existing rights of property
and heritable possession thus remained unaffected.  The individual
allotments were small.  The receivers of land were to be poor
burgesses, fathers of at least three children; the dangerous
principle, that the rendering of military service gave a claim
to landed estate, was not laid down, but, as was reasonable and had
been done at all times, the old soldiers as well as the temporary
lessees to be ejected were simply recommended to the special
consideration of the land-distributors.  The execution of the measure
was entrusted to a commission of twenty men, into which Caesar
distinctly declared that he did not wish to be himself elected.

Opposition of the Aristocracy

The opposition had a difficult task in resisting this proposal.
It could not rationally be denied, that the state-finances ought
after the erection of the provinces of Pontus and Syria to be
in a position to dispense with the moneys from the Campanian leases;
that it was unwarrantable to withhold one of the finest districts
of Italy, and one peculiarly fitted for small holdings,
from private enterprise; and, lastly, that it was as unjust as it
was ridiculous, after the extension of the franchise to all Italy,
still to withhold municipal rights from the township of Capua.
The whole proposal bore the stamp of moderation, honesty, and solidity,
with which a democratic party-character was very dexterously
combined; for in substance it amounted to the re-establishment
of the Capuan colony founded in the time of Marius and again
done away by Sulla.(6)  In form too Caesar observed all possible
consideration.  He laid the project of the agrarian law, as well
as the proposal to ratify collectively the ordinances issued
by Pompeius in the east, and the petition of the farmers of the taxes
for remission of a third of the sums payable by them, in the first
instance before the senate for approval, and declared himself
ready to entertain and discuss proposals for alterations.
The corporation had now opportunity of convincing itself how foolishly
it had acted in driving Pompeius and the equites into the arms
of the adversary by refusing these requests.  Perhaps it was
the secret sense of this, that drove the high-born lords to the most
vehement opposition, which contrasted ill with the calm demeanour
of Caesar.  The agrarian law was rejected by them nakedly and even
without discussion.  The decree as to the arrangements of Pompeius
in Asia found quite as little favour in their eyes.  Cato attempted,
in accordance with the disreputable custom of Roman parliamentary
debate, to kill the proposal regarding the farmers of the taxes
by speaking, that is, to prolong his speech up to the legal hour
for closing the sitting; when Caesar threatened to have the stubborn
man arrested, this proposal too was at length rejected.

Proposals before the Burgesses

Of course all the proposals were now brought before the burgesses.
Without deviating far from the truth, Caesar could tell
the multitude that the senate had scornfully rejected most rational
and most necessary proposals submitted to it in the most respectful
form, simply because they came from the democratic consul.
When he added that the aristocrats had contrived a plot to procure
the rejection of the proposals, and summoned the burgesses,
and more especially Pompeius himself and his old soldiers, to stand
by him against fraud and force, this too was by no means a mere invention.
The aristocracy, with the obstinate weak creature Bibulus
and the unbending dogmatical fool Cato at their head, in reality
intended to push the matter to open violence.  Pompeius, instigated
by Caesar to proclaim his position with reference to the pending
question, declared bluntly, as was not his wont on other occasions,
that if any one should venture to draw the sword, he too would
grasp his, and in that case would not leave the shield at home;
Crassus expressed himself to the same effect The old soldiers
of Pompeius were directed to appear on the day of the vote--
which in fact primarily concerned them--in great numbers,
and with arms under their dress, at the place of voting.

The nobility however left no means untried to frustrate the proposals
of Caesar.  On each day when Caesar appeared before the people,
his colleague Bibulus instituted the well-known political observations
of the weather which interrupted all public business;(7) Caesar
did not trouble himself about the skies, but continued to prosecute
his terrestrial occupation.  The tribunician veto was interposed;
Caesar contented himself with disregarding it. Bibulus and Cato
sprang to the rostra, harangued the multitude, and instigated
the usual riot; Caesar ordered that they should be led away
by lictors from the Forum, and took care that otherwise no harm
should befall them--it was for his interest that the political
comedy should remain such as it was.

The Agrarian Law Carried
Passive Resistance of the Aristocracy

Notwithstanding all the chicanery and all the blustering
of the nobility, the agrarian law, the confirmation of the Asiatic
arrangements, and the remission to the lessees of taxes
were adopted by the burgesses; and the commission of twenty was elected
with Pompeius and Crassus at its head, and installed in office.
With all their exertions the aristocracy had gained nothing,
save that their blind and spiteful antagonism had drawn the bonds
of the coalition still tighter, and their energy, which they were soon
to need for matters more important, had exhausted itself
on these affairs that were at bottom indifferent.  They congratulated
each other on the heroic courage which they had displayed;
the declaration of Bibulus that he would rather die than yield,
the peroration which Cato still continued to deliver when in the hands
of the lictors, were great patriotic feats; otherwise they resigned
themselves to their fate.  The consul Bibulus shut himself up
for the remainder of the year in his house, while he at the same time
intimated by public placard that he had the pious intention
of watching the signs of the sky on all the days appropriate
for public assemblies during that year.  His colleagues once more
admired the great man who, as Ennius had said of the old Fabius,
"saved the state by wise delay," and they followed his example;
most of them, Cato included, no longer appeared in the senate,
but within their four walls helped their consul to fret over
the fact that the history of the world went on in spite of political
astronomy.  To the public this passive attitude of the consul
as well as of the aristocracy in general appeared, as it fairly might,
a political abdication; and the coalition were naturally very well
content that they were left to take their farther steps almost
undisturbed.

Caesar Governor of the Two Gauls

The most important of these steps was the regulating of the future
position of Caesar.  Constitutionally it devolved on the senate
to fix the functions of the second consular year of office before
the election of the consuls took place; accordingly it had, in prospect
of the election of Caesar, selected with that view for 696 two
provinces in which the governor should find no other employment
than the construction of roads and other such works of utility.
Of course the matter could not so remain; it was determined among
the confederates, that Caesar should obtain by decree of the people
an extraordinary command formed on the model of the Gabinio-Manilian
laws.  Caesar however had publicly declared that he would introduce
no proposal in his own favour; the tribune of the people Publius
Vatinius therefore undertook to submit the proposal to the burgesses,
who naturally gave their unconditional assent.  By this means
Caesar obtained the governorship of Cisalpine Gaul and the supreme
command of the three legions which were stationed there
and were already experienced in border warfare under Lucius Afranius,
along with the same rank of propraetor for his adjutants
which those of Pompeius had enjoyed; this office was secured to him
for five years--a longer period than had ever before been assigned
to any general whose appointment was limited to a definite time
at all.  The Transpadanes, who for years had in hope of the franchise
been the clients of the democratic party in Rome and of Caesar
in particular,(8) formed the main portion of his province.
His jurisdiction extended south as far as the Arnus and the Rubico,
and included Luca and Ravenna.  Subsequently there was added to Caesar's
official district the province of Narbo with the one legion
stationed there--a resolution adopted by the senate on the proposal
of Pompeius, that it might at least not see this command
also pass to Caesar by extraordinary decree of the burgesses.
What was wished was thus attained.  As no troops could constitutionally
be stationed in Italy proper,(9) the commander of the legions
of northern Italy and Gaul dominated at the same time Italy and Rome
for the next five years; and he who was master for five years
was master for life.  The consulship of Caesar had attained its object.
As a matter of course, the new holders of power did not neglect
withal to keep the multitude in good humour by games and amusements
of all sorts, and they embraced every opportunity of filling their
exchequer; in the case of the king of Egypt, for instance,
the decree of the people, which recognized him as legitimate ruler,(10)
was sold to him by the coalition at a high price, and in like manner
other dynasts and communities acquired charters and privileges
on this occasion.

Measures Adopted by the Allies for Their Security

The permanence of the arrangements made seemed also sufficiently
secured.  The consulship was, at least for the next year, entrusted
to safe hands.  The public believed at first, that it was destined
for Pompeius and Crassus themselves; the holders of power however
preferred to procure the election of two subordinate but trustworth
men of their party--Aulus Gabinius, the best among Pompeius' adjutants,
and Lucius Piso, who was less important but was Caesar's father-in-law--
as consuls for 696.  Pompeius personally undertook to watch over Italy,
where at the head of the commission of twenty he prosecuted the execution
of the agrarian law and furnished nearly 20,000 burgesses,
in great part old soldiers from his army, with land in the territory
of Capua.  Caesar's north-Italian legions served to back him
against the opposition in the capital.  There existed no prospect,
immediately at least, of a rupture among the holders of power themselves.
The laws issued by Caesar as consul, in the maintenance of which
Pompeius was at least as much interested as Caesar, formed
a guarantee for the continuance of the breach between Pompeius
and the aristocracy--whose heads, and Cato in particular,
continued to treat these laws as null--and thereby a guarantee
for the subsistence of the coalition.  Moreover, the personal bonds
of connection between its chiefs were drawn closer.  Caesar had
honestly and faithfully kept his word to his confederates
without curtailing or cheating them of what he had promised,
and in particular had fought to secure the agrarian law proposed
in the interest of Pompeius, just as if the case had been his own,
with dexterity and energy; Pompeius was not insensible to upright
dealing and good faith, and was kindly disposed towards the man
who had helped him to get quit at a blow of the sorry part
of a suppliant which he had been playing for three years.  Frequent
and familiar intercourse with a man of the irresistible amiableness
of Caesar did what was farther requisite to convert the alliance
of interests into an alliance of friendship.  The result
and the pledge of this friendship--at the same time, doubtless,
a public announcement which could hardly be misunderstood
of the newly established conjoint rule--was the marriage of Pompeius
with Caesar's only daughter, three-and-twenty years of age.
Julia, who had inherited the charm of her father, lived
in the happiest domestic relations with her husband, who was
nearly twice as old; and the burgesses longing for rest
and order after so many troubles and crises, saw in this nuptial
alliance the guarantee of a peaceful and prosperous future.

Situation of the Aristocracy

The more firmly and closely the alliance was thus cemented
between Pompeius and Caesar, the more hopeless grew the cause
of the aristocracy.  They felt the sword suspended over their head
and knew Caesar sufficiently to have no doubt that he would,
if necessary, use it without hesitation.  "On all sides," wrote
one of them, "we are checkmated; we have already through fear of death
or of banishment despaired of 'freedom'; every one sighs,
no one ventures to speak." More the confederates could not desire.
But though the majority of the aristocracy was in this desirable
frame of mind, there was, of course, no lack of Hotspurs among
this party.  Hardly had Caesar laid down the consulship, when some
of the most violent aristocrats, Lucius Domitius and Gaius Memmius,
proposed in a full senate the annulling of the Julian laws.
This indeed was simply a piece of folly, which redounded only
to the benefit of the coalition; for, when Caesar now himself
insisted that the senate should investigate the validity of the laws
assailed, the latter could not but formally recognize their
legality.  But, as may readily be conceived, the holders of power
found in this a new call to make an example of some of the most
notable and noisiest of their opponents, and thereby to assure
themselves that the remainder would adhere to that fitting policy
of sighing and silence.  At first there had been a hope
that the clause of the agrarian law, which as usual required
all the senators to take an oath to the new law on pain of forfeiting
their political rights, would induce its most vehement opponents
to banish themselves, after the example of Metellus Numidicus,(11)
by refusing the oath.  But these did not show themselves
so complaisant; even the rigid Cato submitted to the oath,
and his Sanchos followed him.  A second, far from honourable,
attempt to threaten the heads of the aristocracy with criminal
impeachments on account of an alleged plot for the murder of Pompeius,
and so to drive them into exile, was frustrated by the incapacity
of the instruments; the informer, one Vettius, exaggerated
and contradicted himself so grossly, and the tribune Vatinius,
who directed the foul scheme, showed his complicity with that Vettius
so clearly, that it was found advisable to strangle the latter
in prison and to let the whole matter drop.  On this occasion however
they had obtained sufficient evidence of the total disorganization
of the aristocracy and the boundless alarm of the genteel lords:
even a man like Lucius Lucullus had thrown himself in person
at Caesar's feet and publicly declared that he found himself compelled
by reason of his great age to withdraw from public life.

Cato and Cicero Removed

Ultimately therefore they were content with a few isolated victims.
It was of primary importance to remove Cato, who made no secret
of his conviction as to the nullity of all the Julian laws,
and who was a man to act as he thought.  Such a man Marcus Cicero
was certainly not, and they did not give themselves the trouble
to fear him.  But the democratic party, which played the leading part
in the coalition, could not possibly after its victory leave
unpunished the judicial murder of the 5th December 691, which it
had so loudly and so justly censured.  Had they wished to bring
to account the real authors of the fatal decree, they ought
to have seized not on the pusillanimous consul, but on the section
of the strict aristocracy which had urged the timorous man
to that execution.  But in formal law it was certainly not the advisers
of the consul, but the consul himself, that was responsible for it,
and it was above all the gentler course to call the consul alone
to account and to leave the senatorial college wholly out of the case;
for which reason in the grounds of the proposal directed against
Cicero the decree of the senate, in virtue of which he ordered
the execution, was directly described as supposititious.  Even against
Cicero the holders of power would gladly have avoided steps
that attracted attention; but he could not prevail on himself either
to give to those in power the guarantees which they required,
or to banish himself from Rome under one of the feasible pretexts
on several occasions offered to him, or even to keep silence.
With the utmost desire to avoid any offence and the most sincere alarm,
he yet had not self-control enough to be prudent; the word had
to come out, when a petulant witticism stung him, or when his self-
conceit almost rendered crazy by the praise of so many noble lords
gave vent to the well-cadenced periods of the plebeian advocate.

Clodius

The execution of the measures resolved on against Cato and Cicero
was committed to the loose and dissolute, but clever and pre-
eminently audacious Publius Clodius, who had lived for years
in the bitterest enmity with Cicero, and, with the view of satisfying
that enmity and playing a part as demagogue, had got himself converted
under the consulship of Caesar by a hasty adoption from a patrician
into a plebeian, and then chosen as tribune of the people
for the year 696.  To support Clodius, the proconsul Caesar remained
in the immediate vicinity of the capital till the blow was struck
against the two victims.  Agreeably to the instructions
which he had received, Clodius proposed to the burgesses to entrust
Cato with the regulation of the complicated municipal affairs
of the Byzantines and with the annexation of the kingdom of Cyprus,
which as well as Egypt had fallen to the Romans by the testament
of Alexander II, but had not like Egypt bought off the Roman
annexation, and the king of which, moreover, had formerly given
personal offence to Clodius.  As to Cicero, Clodius brought in
a project of law which characterized the execution of a burgess
without trial and sentence as a crime to be punished with banishment.
Cato was thus removed by an honourable mission, while Cicero
was visited at least with the gentlest possible punishment and,
besides, was not designated by name in the proposal.  But they did not
refuse themselves the pleasure, on the one hand, of punishing
a man notoriously timid and belonging to the class of political
weathercocks for the conservative energy which he displayed,
and, on the other hand, of investing the bitter opponent
of all interferences of the burgesses in administration
and of all extraordinary commands with such a command conferred
by decree of the burgesses themselves; and with similar humour
the proposal respecting Cato was based on the ground of the abnormal
virtue of the man, which made him appear pre-eminently qualified
to execute so delicate a commission, as was the confiscation
of the considerable crown treasure of Cyprus, without embezzlement.
Both proposals bear generally the same character of respectful
deference and cool irony, which marks throughout the bearing of Caesar
in reference to the senate.  They met with no resistance.
It was naturally of no avail, that the majority of the senate,
with the view of protesting in some way against the mockery
and censure of their decree in the matter of Catilina, publicly
put on mourning, and that Cicero himself, now when it was too late,
fell on his knees and besought mercy from Pompeius; he had to banish
himself even before the passing of the law which debarred him
from his native land (April 696).  Cato likewise did not venture
to provoke sharper measures by declining the commission
which he had received, but accepted itand embarked for the east.(12)
What was most immediately necessary was done; Caesar too
might leave Italy to devote himself to more serious tasks.




Chapter VII

The Subjugation of the West

The Romanizing of the West

When the course of history turns from the miserable monotony
of the political selfishness, which fought its battles
in the senate-house and in the streets of the capital, to matters
of greater importance than the question whether the first monarch
of Rome should be called Gnaeus, Gaius, or Marcus, we may well
be allowed--on the threshold of an event, the effects of which still
at the present day influence the destinies of the world--to look round us
for a moment, and to indicate the point of view under which the conquest
of what is now France by the Romans, and their first contact
with the inhabitants of Germany and of Great Britain, are to be
apprehended in their bearing on the general history of the world.

By virtue of the law, that a people which has grown into a state
absorbs its neighbours who are in political nonage, and a civilized
people absorbs its neighbours who are in intellectual nonage--
by virtue of this law, which is as universally valid and as much
a law of nature as the law of gravity--the Italian nation (the only
one in antiquity which was able to combine a superior political
development and a superior civilization, though it presented
the latter only in an imperfect and external manner) was entitled
to reduce to subjection the Greek states of the east which were ripe
for destruction, and to dispossess the peoples of lower grades
of culture in the west--Libyans, Iberians, Celts, Germans--by means
of its settlers; just as England with equal right has in Asia reduced
to subjection a civilization of rival standing but politically
impotent, and in America and Australia has marked and ennobled,
and still continues to mark and ennoble, extensive barbarian
countries with the impress of its nationality.  The Roman aristocracy
had accomplished the preliminary condition required for this task--
the union of Italy; the task itself it never solved, but always
regarded the extra-Italian conquests either as simply a necessary
evil, or as a fiscal possession virtually beyond the pale
of the state.  It is the imperishable glory of the Roman democracy
or monarchy--for the two coincide--to have correctly apprehended
and vigorously realized this its highest destination.  What
the irresistible force of circumstances had paved the way for,
through the senate establishing against its will the foundations
of the future Roman dominion in the west as in the east; what thereafter
the Roman emigration to the provinces--which came as a public
calamity, no doubt, but also in the western regions at any rate
as a pioneer of a higher culture--pursued as matter of instinct;
the creator of the Roman democracy, Gaius Gracchus, grasped
and began to carry out with statesmanlike clearness and decision.
The two fundamental ideas of the new policy--to reunite
the territories under the power of Rome, so far as they were Hellenic,
and to colonize them, so far as they were not Hellenic--had already
in the Gracchan age been practically recognized by the annexation
of the kingdom of Attalus and by the Transalpine conquests of Flaccus:
but the prevailing reaction once more arrested their application.
The Roman state remained a chaotic mass of countries without thorough
occupation and without proper limits.  Spain and the Graeco-Asiatic
possessions were separated from the mother country by wide
territories, of which barely the borders along the coast
were subject to the Romans; on the north coast of Africa the domains
of Carthage and Cyrene alone were occupied like oases; large tracts
even of the subject territory, especially in Spain, were but nominally
subject to the Romans.  Absolutely nothing was done on the part
of the government towards concentrating and rounding off
their dominion, and the decay of the fleet seemed at length
to dissolve the last bond of connection between the distant
possessions.  The democracy no doubt attempted, so soon as it
again raised its head, to shape its external policy in the spirit
of Gracchus--Marius in particular cherished such ideas--but as it
did not for any length of time attain the helm, its projects
were left unfulfilled.  It was not till the democracy practically took
in hand the government on the overthrow of the Sullan constitution
in 684, that a revolution in this respect occurred.  First of all
their sovereignty on the Mediterranean was restored--the most
vital question for a state like that of Rome.  Towards the east,
moreover, the boundary of the Euphrates was secured by the annexation
of the provinces of Pontus and Syria.  But there still remained beyond
the Alps the task of at once rounding off the Roman territory towards
the north and west, and of gaining a fresh virgin soil there
for Hellenic civilization and for the yet unbroken vigour
of the Italic race.

Historical Significance of the Conquests of Caesar

This task Gaius Caesar undertook.  It is more than an error,
it is an outrage upon the sacred spirit dominant in history,
to regard Gaul solely as the parade ground on which Caesar
exercised himself and his legions for the impending civil war.
Though the subjugation of the west was for Caesar so far a means
to an end that he laid the foundations of his later height of power
in the Transalpine wars, it is the especial privilege of a statesman
of genius that his means themselves are ends in their turn.  Caesar
needed no doubt for his party aims a military power, but he did not
conquer Gaul as a partisan.  There was a direct political necessity
for Rome to meet the perpetually threatened invasion of the Germans
thus early beyond the Alps, and to construct a rampart there
which should secure the peace of the Roman world.  But even this
important object was not the highest and ultimate reason for which Gaul
was conquered by Caesar.  When the old home had become too
narrow for the Roman burgesses and they were in danger of decay,
the senate's policy of Italian conquest saved them from ruin.
Now the Italian home had become in its turn too narrow; once more
the state languished under the same social evils repeating themselves
in similar fashion only on a greater scale.  It was a brilliant
idea, a grand hope, which led Caesar over the Alps--the idea
and the confident expectation that he should gain there for his
fellow-burgesses a new boundless home, and regenerate the state
a second time by placing it on a broader basis.

Caesar in Spain

The campaign which Caesar undertook in 693 in Further Spain, may
be in some sense included among the enterprises which aimed at
the subjugation of the west.  Long as Spain had obeyed the Romans,
its western shore had remained substantially independent of them
even after the expedition of Decimus Brutus against the Callaeci(1),
and they had not even set foot on the northern coast; while
the predatory raids, to which the subject provinces found
themselves continually exposed from those quarters, did no small
injury to the civilization and Romanizing of Spain.  Against these
the expedition of Caesar along the west coast was directed.
He crossed the chain of the Herminian mountains (Sierra de Estrella)
bounding the Tagus on the north; after having conquered their
inhabitants and transplanted them in part to the plain, he reduced
the country on both sides of the Douro and arrived at the northwest
point of the peninsula, where with the aid of a flotilla brought
up from Gades he occupied Brigantium (Corunna).  By this means
the peoples adjoining the Atlantic Ocean, Lusitanians and Callaecians,
were forced to acknowledge the Roman supremacy, while the conqueror
was at the same time careful to render the position of the subjects
generally more tolerable by reducing the tribute to be paid to Rome
and regulating the financial affairs of the communities.

But, although in this military and administrative debut of the great
general and statesman the same talents and the same leading ideas are
discernible which he afterwards evinced on a greater stage, his agency
in the Iberian peninsula was much too transient to have any deep effect;
the more especially as, owing to its physical and national peculiarities,
nothing but action steadily continued for a considerable time could
exert any durable influence there.

Gaul

A more important part in the Romanic development of the west
was reserved by destiny for the country which stretches between
the Pyrenees and the Rhine, the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean,
and which since the Augustan age has been especially designated
by the name of the land of the Celts--Gallia--although strictly
speaking the land of the Celts was partly narrower, partly much
more extensive, and the country so called never formed a national
unity, and did not form a political unity before Augustus.
For this very reason it is not easy to present a clear picture
of the very heterogeneous state of things which Caesar encountered
on his arrival there in 696.

The Roman Province
Wars and Revolts There

In the region on the Mediterranean, which, embracing approximately
Languedoc on the west of the Rhone, on the east Dauphine and Provence,
had been for sixty years a Roman province, the Roman arms had seldom
been at rest since the Cimbrian invasion which had swept over it.
In 664 Gaius Caelius had fought with the Salyes about Aquae Sextiae,
and in 674 Gaius Flaccus,(2) on his march to Spain, with other
Celtic nations.  When in the Sertorian war the governor Lucius Manlius,
compelled to hasten to the aid of his colleagues beyond the Pyrenees,
returned defeated from Ilerda (Lerida) and on his way home
was vanquished a second time by the western neighbours
of the Roman province, the Aquitani (about 676;(3)), this seems
to have provoked a general rising of the provincials between
the Pyrenees and the Rhone, perhaps even of those between the Rhone
and Alps.  Pompeius had to make his way with the sword through
the insurgent Gaul to Spain,(4) and by way of penalty for their
rebellion gave the territories of the Volcae-Arecomici
and the Helvii (dep. Gard and Ardeche) over to the Massiliots;
the governor Manius Fonteius (678-680) carried out these arrangements
and restored tranquillity in the province by subduing the Vocontii
(dep.  Drome), protecting Massilia from the insurgents,
and liberating the Roman capital Narbo which they invested.
Despair, however, and the financial embarrassment which the participation
in the sufferings of the Spanish war(5) and generally the official
and non-official exactions of the Romans brought upon the Gallic
provinces, did not allow them to be tranquil; and in particular
the canton of the Allobroges, the most remote from Narbo,
was in a perpetual ferment, which was attested by the "pacification"
that Gaius Piso undertook there in 688 as well as by the behaviour
of the Allobrogian embassy in Rome on occasion of the anarchist plot
in 691,(6) and which soon afterwards (693) broke into open revolt
Catugnatus the leader of the Allobroges in this war of despair,
who had at first fought not unsuccessfully, was conquered at Solonium
after a glorious resistance by the governor Gaius Pomptinus.

Bounds
Relations to Rome

Notwithstanding all these conflicts the bounds of the Roman
territory were not materially advanced; Lugudunum Convenarum,
where Pompeius had settled the remnant of the Sertorian army,(7)
Tolosa, Vienna and Genava were still the most remote Roman townships
towards the west and north.  But at the same time the importance
of these Gallic possessions for the mother country was continually
on the increase.  The glorious climate, akin to that of Italy,
the favourable nature of the soil, the large and rich region lying
behind so advantageous for commerce with its mercantile routes
reaching as far as Britain, the easy intercourse by land and sea
with the mother country, rapidly gave to southern Gaul an economic
importance for Italy, which much older possessions, such as those
in Spain, had not acquired in the course of centuries; and as
the Romans who had suffered political shipwreck at this period sought
an asylum especially in Massilia, and there found once more Italian
culture and Italian luxury, voluntary emigrants from Italy also
were attracted more and more to the Rhone and the Garonne.
"The province of Gaul," it was said in a sketch drawn ten years
before Caesar's arrival, "is full of merchants; it swarms with Roman
burgesses.  No native of Gaul transacts a piece of business without
the intervention of a Roman; every penny, that passes from one hand
to another in Gaul, goes through the account books of the Roman
burgesses." From the same description it appears that in addition
to the colonists of Narbo there were Romans cultivating land
and rearing cattle, resident in great numbers in Gaul; as to which,
however, it must not be overlooked that most of the provincial land
possessed by Romans, just like the greater part of the English
possessions in the earliest times in America, was in the hands
of the high nobility living in Italy, and those farmers and graziers
consisted for the most part of their stewards--slaves or freedmen.

Incipient Romanizing

It is easy to understand how under such circumstances civilization
and Romanizing rapidly spread among the natives.  These Celts
were not fond of agriculture; but their new masters compelled them
to exchange the sword for the plough, and it is very credible
that the embittered resistance of the Allobroges was provoked in part
by some such injunctions.  In earlier times Hellenism had also
to a certain degree dominated those regions; the elements
of a higher culture, the stimulus to the cultivation of the vine
and the olive,(8) to the use of writing(9) and to the coining of money,
came to them from Massilia.  The Hellenic culture was in this case
far from being set aside by the Romans; Massilia gained through
them more influence than it lost; and even in the Roman period
Greek physicians and rhetoricians were publicly employed
in the Gallic cantons.  But, as may readily be conceived, Hellenism
in southern Gaul acquired through the agency of the Romans the same
character as in Italy; the distinctively Hellenic civilization
gave place to the Latino-Greek mixed culture, which soon made
proselytes here in great numbers.  The "Gauls in the breeches,"
as the inhabitants of southern Gaul were called by way of contrast
to the "Gauls in the toga" of northern Italy, were not indeed
like the latter already completely Romanized, but they were even now
very perceptibly distinguished from the "longhaired Gauls"
of the northern regions still unsubdued.  The semiculture becoming
naturalized among them furnished, doubtless, materials enough
for ridicule of their barbarous Latin, and people did not fail
to suggest to any one suspected of Celtic descent his "relationship
with the breeches"; but this bad Latin was yet sufficient
to enable even the remote Allobroges to transact business
with the Roman authorities, and even to give testimony in the Roman
courts without an interpreter.

While the Celtic and Ligurian population of these regions
was thus in the course of losing its nationality, and was languishing
and pining withal under a political and economic oppression,
the intolerable nature of which is sufficiently attested by their
hopeless insurrections, the decline of the native population here
went hand in hand with the naturalizing of the same higher culture
which we find at this period in Italy.  Aquae Sextiae and still
more Narbo were considerable townships, which might probably be
named by the side of Beneventum and Capua; and Massilia, the best
organized, most free, most capable of self-defence, and most
powerful of all the Greek cities dependent on Rome, under its
rigorous aristocratic government to which the Roman conservatives
probably pointed as the model of a good urban constitution,
in possession of an important territory which had been considerably
enlarged by the Romans and of an extensive trade, stood by the side
of those Latin towns as Rhegium and Neapolis stood in Italy
by the side of Beneventum and Capua.

Free Gaul

Matters wore a different aspect, when one crossed the Roman frontier.
The great Celtic nation, which in the southern districts already
began to be crushed by the Italian immigration, still moved
to the north of the Cevennes in its time-hallowed freedom.
It is not the first time that we meet it: the Italians had already
fought with the offsets and advanced posts of this vast stock
on the Tiber and on the Po, in the mountains of Castile and Carinthia,
and even in the heart of Asia Minor; but it was here that the main stock
was first assailed at its very core by their attacks.  The Celtic race
had on its settlement in central Europe diffused itself chiefly
over the rich river-valleys and the pleasant hill-country
of the present France, including the western districts of Germany
and Switzerland, and from thence had occupied at least the southern
part of England, perhaps even at this time all Great Britain
and Ireland;(10) it formed here more than anywhere else a broad,
geographically compact, mass of peoples.  In spite of
the differences in language and manners which naturally
were to be found within this wide territory, a close mutual intercourse,
an innate sense of fellowship, seems to have knit together
the tribes from the Rhone and Garonne to the Rhine and the Thames;
whereas, although these doubtless were in a certain measure locally
connected with the Celts in Spain and in the modern Austria,
the mighty mountain barriers of the Pyrenees and the Alps
on the one hand, and the encroachments of the Romans and the Germans
which also operated here on the other, interrupted the intercourse
and the intrinsic connection of the cognate peoples far otherwise
than the narrow arm of the sea interrupted the relations
of the continental and the British Celts.  Unhappily we are not
permitted to trace stage by stage the history of the internal development
of this remarkable people in these its chief seats; we must be content
with presenting at least some outline of its historical culture
and political condition, as it here meets us in the time of Caesar.

Population
Agriculture and the Rearing of Cattle

Gaul was, according to the reports of the ancients, comparatively
well peopled.  Certain statements lead us to infer that in the Belgic
districts there were some 200 persons to the square mile--
a proportion such as nearly holds at present for Wales
and for Livonia--in the Helvetic canton about 245;(11) it is probable
that in the districts which were more cultivated than the Belgic
and less mountainous than the Helvetian, as among the Bituriges,
Arverni, Haedui, the number rose still higher.  Agriculture
was no doubt practised in Gaul--for even the contemporaries of Caesar
were surprised in the region of the Rhine by the custom of manuring
with marl,(12) and the primitive Celtic custom of preparing beer
(-cervesia-) from barley is likewise an evidence of the early
and wide diffusion of the culture of grain--but it was not held
in estimation.  Even in the more civilized south it was reckoned not
becoming for the free Celts to handle the plough.  In far higher
estimation among the Celts stood pastoral husbandry, for which
the Roman landholders of this epoch very gladly availed themselves
both of the Celtic breed of cattle, and of the brave Celtic slaves
skilled in riding and familiar with the rearing of animals.(13)
Particularly in the northern Celtic districts pastoral husbandry
was thoroughly predominant.  Brittany was in Caesar's time
a country poor in corn.  In the north-east dense forests, attaching
themselves to the heart of the Ardennes, stretched almost without
interruption from the German Ocean to the Rhine; and on the plains
of Flanders and Lorraine, now so fertile, the Menapian and Treverian
herdsman then fed his half-wild swine in the impenetrable oak-forest.
Just as in the valley of the Po the Romans made the production
of wool and the culture of corn supersede the Celtic feeding
of pigs on acorns, so the rearing of sheep and the agriculture
in the plains of the Scheldt and the Maas are traceable
to their influence.  In Britain even the threshing of corn
was not yet usual; and in its more northern districts agriculture
was not practised, and the rearing of cattle was the only known mode
of turning the soil to account.  The culture of the olive and vine,
which yielded rich produce to the Massiliots, was not yet prosecuted
beyond the Cevennes in the time of Caesar.

Urban Life

The Gauls were from the first disposed to settle in groups;
there were open villages everywhere, and the Helvetic canton
alone numbered in 696 four hundred of these, besides a multitude
of single homesteads.  But there were not wanting also walled towns,
whose walls of alternate layers surprised the Romans both by their
suitableness and by the elegant interweaving of timber and stones
in their construction; while, it is true, even in the towns
of the Allobroges the buildings were erected solely of wood.
Of such towns the Helvetii had twelve and the Suessiones an equal number;
whereas at all events in the more northern districts, such as among
the Nervii, while there were doubtless also towns, the population
during war sought protection in the morasses and forests rather
than behind their walls, and beyond the Thames the primitive
defence of the wooden barricade altogether took the place
of towns and was in war the only place of refuge for men and herds.

Intercourse

In close association with the comparatively considerable
development of urban life stands the activity of intercourse
by land and by water.  Everywhere there were roads and bridges.
The river-navigation, which streams like the Rhone, Garonne, Loire,
and Seine, of themselves invited, was considerable and lucrative.
But far more remarkable was the maritime navigation of the Celts.
Not only were the Celts, to all appearance, the nation that first
regularly navigated the Atlantic ocean, but we find that the art
of building and of managing vessels had attained among them
a remarkable development.  The navigation of the peoples
of the Mediterranean had, as may readily be conceived from the nature
of the waters traversed by them, for a comparatively long period
adhered to the oar; the war-vessels of the Phoenicians, Hellenes,
and Romans were at all times oared galleys, in which the sail
was applied only as an occasional aid to the oar; the trading vessels
alone were in the epoch of developed ancient civilization "sailers"
properly so called.(14)   On the other hand the Gauls doubtless
employed in the Channel in Caesar's time, as for long afterwards,
a species of portable leathern skiffs, which seem to have been
in the main common oared boats, but on the west coast of Gaul
the Santones, the Pictones, and above all the Veneti sailed in large
though clumsily built ships, which were not impelled by oars
but were provided with leathern sails and iron anchor-chains;
and they employed these not only for their traffic with Britain,
but also in naval combat.  Here therefore we not only meet
for the first time with navigation in the open ocean, but we find
that here the sailing vessel first fully took the place
of the oared boat--an improvement, it is true, which the declining
activity of the old world did not know how to turn to account,
and the immeasurable results of which our own epoch of renewed culture
is employed in gradually reaping.

Commerce
Manufactures

With this regular maritime intercourse between the British
and Gallic coasts, the very close political connection between
the inhabitants on both sides of the Channel is as easily explained
as the flourishing of transmarine commerce and of fisheries.
It was the Celts of Brittany in particular, that brought the tin
of the mines of Cornwall from England and carried it by the river
and land routes of Gaul to Narbo and Massilia.  The statement,
that in Caesar's time certain tribes at the mouth of the Rhine subsisted
on fish and birds' eggs, may probably refer to the circumstance
that marine fishing and the collection of the eggs of sea-birds
were prosecuted there on an extensive scale.  When we put together
and endeavour to fill up the isolated and scanty statements which have
reached us regarding the Celtic commerce and intercourse, we come
to see why the tolls of the river and maritime ports play a great
part in the budgets of certain cantons, such as those of the Haedui
and the Veneti, and why the chief god of the nation was regarded
by them as the protector of the roads and of commerce, and at
the same time as the inventor of manufactures.  Accordingly the Celtic
industry cannot have been wholly undeveloped; indeed the singular
dexterity of the Celts, and their peculiar skill in imitating
any model and executing any instructions, are noticed by Caesar.
In most branches, however, their handicraft does not appear
to have risen above the ordinary level; the manufacture of linen
and woollen stuffs, that subsequently flourished in central
and northern Gaul, was demonstrably called into existence only
by the Romans.  The elaboration of metals forms an exception,
and so far as we know the only one.  The copper implements
not unfrequently of excellent workmanship and even now malleable,
which are brought to light in the tombs of Gaul, and the carefully
adjusted Arvernian gold coins, are still at the present day
striking witnesses of the skill of the Celtic workers in copper
and gold; and with this the reports of the ancients well accord,
that the Romans learned the art of tinning from the Bituriges
and that of silvering from the Alesini--inventions, the first of which
was naturally suggested by the traffic' in tin, and both of which
were probably made in the period of Celtic freedom.

Mining

Hand in hand with dexterity in the elaboration of the metals went
the art of procuring them, which had attained, more especially in
the iron mines on the Loire, such a degree of professional skill
that the miners played an important part in the sieges.  The opinion
prevalent among the Romans of this period, that Gaul was one
of the richest gold countries in the world, is no doubt refuted
by the well-known nature of the soil and by the character
of the articles found in the Celtic tombs, in which gold appears
but sparingly and with far less frequency than in the similar
repositories of the true native regions of gold; this conception
no doubt had its origin merely from the descriptions which Greek
travellers and Roman soldiers, doubtless not without strong
exaggeration, gave to their countrymen of the magnificence
of the Arvernian kings,(15) and of the treasures of the Tolosan
temples.(16)  But their stories were not pure fictions.  It may
well be believed that in and near the rivers which flow
from the Alps and the Pyrenees gold-washing and searches for gold,
which are unprofitable at the present value of labour, were worked
with profit and on a considerable scale in ruder times and with a system
of slavery; besides, the commercial relations of Gaul may,
as is not unfrequently the case with half-civilized peoples,
have favoured the accumulation of a dead stock of the precious metals.

Art and Science

The low state of the arts of design is remarkable,
and is the more striking by the side of this mechanical skill
in handling the metals.  The fondness for parti-coloured and brilliant
ornaments shows the want of a proper taste, which is sadly confirmed
by the Gallic coins with their representations sometimes exceedingly
simple, sometimes odd, but always childish in design, and almost
without exception rude beyond parallel in their execution.
It is perhaps unexampled that a coinage practised for centuries
with a certain technical skill should have essentially limited itself
to always imitating two or three Greek dies, and always
with increasing deformity.  On the other hand the art of poetry
was highly valued by the Celts, and intimately blended
with the religious and even with the political institutions
of the nation; we find religious poetry, as well as that of the court
and of the mendicant, flourishing.(17)  Natural science and philosophy
also found, although subject to the forms and fetters of the theology
of the country, a certain amount of attention among the Celts;
and Hellenic humanism met with a ready reception wherever
and in whatever shape it approached them.  The knowledge of writing
was general at least among the priests.  For the most part in free Gaul
the Greek writing was made use of in Caesar's time, as was done
among others by the Helvetii; but in its most southern districts
even then, in consequence of intercourse with the Romanized Celts,
the Latin attained predominance--we meet with it, for instance,
on the Arvernian coins of this period.

Political Organization
Cantonal Constitution

The political development of the Celtic nation also presents
very remarkable phenomena.  The constitution of the state was based
in this case, as everywhere, on the clan-canton, with its prince,
its council of the elders, and its community of freemen capable
of bearing arms; but the peculiarity in this case was that it never
got beyond this cantonal constitution.  Among the Greeks and Romans
the canton was very early superseded by the ring-wall as the basis
of political unity; where two cantons found themselves together
within the same walls, they amalgamated into one commonwealth;
where a body of burgesses assigned to a portion of their fellow-
burgesses a new ring-wall, there regularly arose in this way a new
state connected with the mother community only by ties of piety
and, at most, of clientship.  Among the Celts on the other hand
the "burgess-body" continued at all times to be the clan; prince
and council presided over the canton and not over any town,
and the general diet of the canton formed the authority of last resort
in the state.  The town had, as in the east, merely mercantile
and strategic, not political importance; for which reason the Gallic
townships, even when walled and very considerable such as Vienna
and Genava, were in the view of the Greeks and Romans nothing
but villages.  In the time of Caesar the original clan-constitution
still subsisted substantially unaltered among the insular Celts
and in the northern cantons of the mainland; the general assembly held
the supreme authority; the prince was in essential questions bound
by its decrees; the common council was numerous--it numbered
in certain clans six hundred members--but does not appear
to have had more importance than the senate under the Roman kings.
In the more stirring southern portion of the land, again,
one or two generations before Caesar--the children of the last kings
were still living in his time--there had occurred, at least
among the larger clans, the Arverni, Haedui, Sequani, Helvetii,
a revolution which set aside the royal dominion and gave the power
into the hands of the nobility.

Development of Knighthood
Breaking Up of the Old Cantonal Constitution

It is simply the reverse side of the total want of urban
commonwealths among the Celts just noticed, that the opposite pole
of political development, knighthood, so thoroughly preponderates
in the Celtic clan-constitution.  The Celtic aristocracy was to all
appearance a high nobility, for the most part perhaps the members
of the royal or formerly royal families; as indeed it is remarkable
that the heads of the opposite parties in the same clan
very frequently belong to the same house.  These great families
combined in their hands financial, warlike, and political ascendency.
They monopolized the leases of the profitable rights of the state.
They compelled the free commons, who were oppressed by the burden
of taxation, to borrow from them, and to surrender their freedom
first de facto as debtors, then de jure as bondmen.  They developed
the system of retainers, that is, the privilege of the nobility
to surround themselves with a number of hired mounted servants--
the -ambacti- as they were called (18)--and thereby to form a state
within the state; and, resting on the support of these troops
of their own, they defied the legal authorities and the common levy
and practically broke up the commonwealth.  If in a clan,
which numbered about 80,000 men capable of arms, a single noble
could appear at the diet with 10,000 retainers, not reckoning
the bondmen and the debtors, it is clear that such an one
was more an independent dynast than a burgess of his clan.  Moreover,
the leading families of the different clans were closely connected
and through intermarriages and special treaties formed virtually
a compact league, in presence of which the single clan was powerless.
Therefore the communities were no longer able to maintain
the public peace, and the law of the strong arm reigned throughout.
The dependent found protection only from his master, whom duty
and interest compelled to redress the injury inflicted on his client;
the state had no longer the power to protect those who were free,
and consequently these gave themselves over in numbers to some
powerful man as clients.

Abolition of the Monarchy

The common assembly lost its political importance; and even
the power of the prince, which should have checked the encroachments
of the nobility, succumbed to it among the Celts as well as in Latium.
In place of the king came the "judgment-worker" or -Vergobretus-,(19)
who was like the Roman consul nominated only for a year.
So far as the canton still held together at all, it was led
by the common council, in which naturally the heads of the aristocracy
usurped the government.  Of course under such circumstances
there was agitation in the several clans much in the same way
as there had been agitation in Latium for centuries after the expulsion
of the kings: while the nobility of the different communities combined
to form a separate alliance hostile to the power of the community,
the multitude ceased not to desire the restoration of the monarchy;
and not unfrequently a prominent nobleman attempted, as Spurius
Cassius had done in Rome, with the support of the mass of those
belonging to the canton to break down the power of his peers,
and to reinstate the crown in its rights for his own special benefit.

Efforts towards National Unity

While the individual cantons were thus irremediably declining,
the sense of unity was at the same time powerfully stirring
in the nation and seeking in various ways to take shape and hold.
That combination of the whole Celtic nobility in contradistinction
to the individual canton-unions, while disturbing the existing order
of things, awakened and fostered the conception of the collective
unity of the nation.  The attacks directed against the nation
from without, and the continued diminution of its territory in war
with its neighbours, operated in the same direction.  Like the Hellenes
in their wars with the Persians, and the Italians in their wars
with the Celts, the Transalpine Gauls seem to have become conscious
of the existence and the power of their national unity in the wars
against Rome.  Amidst the dissensions of rival clans and all their
feudal quarrelling there might still be heard the voices of those
who were ready to purchase the independence of the nation
at the cost of the independence of the several cantons, and even
at that of the seignorial rights of the knights.  The thorough
popularity of the opposition to a foreign yoke was shown by the wars
of Caesar, with reference to whom the Celtic patriot party occupied
a position entirely similar to that of the German patriots
towards Napoleon; its extent and organization are attested,
among other things, by the telegraphic rapidity with which news
was communicated from one point to another.

Religious Union of the Nation
Druids

The universality and the strength of the Celtic national feeling
would be inexplicable but for the circumstance that, amidst
the greatest political disruption, the Celtic nation had for long
been centralized in respect of religion and even of theology.
The Celtic priesthood or, to use the native name, the corporation
of the Druids, certainly embraced the British islands and all Gaul,
and perhaps also other Celtic countries, in a common religious-
national bond.  It possessed a special head elected by the priests
themselves; special schools, in which its very comprehensive
tradition was transmitted; special privileges, particularly
exemption from taxation and military service, which every clan
respected; annual councils, which were held near Chartres
at the "centre of the Celtic earth"; and above all, a believing people,
who in painful piety and blind obedience to their priests seem
to have been nowise inferior to the Irish of modern times.  It may
readily be conceived that such a priesthood attempted to usurp,
as it partially did usurp, the secular government; where the annual
monarchy subsisted, it conducted the elections in the event
of an interregnum; it successfully laid claim to the right of excluding
individuals and whole communities from religious, and consequently
also from civil, society; it was careful to draw to itself the most
important civil causes, especially processes as to boundaries
and inheritance; on the ground, apparently, of its right to exclude
from the community, and perhaps also of the national custom
that criminals should be by preference taken for the usual
human sacrifices, it developed an extensive priestly criminal
jurisdiction, which was co-ordinate with that of the kings
and vergobrets; it even claimed the right of deciding on war and peace.
The Gauls were not far removed from an ecclesiastical state
with its pope and councils, its immunities, interdicts,
and spiritual courts; only this ecclesiastical state did not,
like that of recent times, stand aloof from the nations,
but was on the contrary pre-eminently national.

Want of Political Centralization
The Canton-Leagues

But while the sense of mutual relationship was thus vividly
awakened among the Celtic tribes, the nation was still precluded
from attaining a basis of political centralization such as Italy
found in the Roman burgesses, and the Hellenes and Germans
in the Macedonian and Frank kings.  The Celtic priesthood and likewise
the nobility--although both in a certain sense represented and combined
the nation--were yet, on the one hand, incapable of uniting it
in consequence of their particular class-interests, and, on the other
hand, sufficiently powerful to allow no king and no canton to accomplish
the work of union.  Attempts at this work were not wanting;
they followed, as the cantonal constitution suggested,
the system of hegemony.  A powerful canton induced a weaker
to become subordinate, on such a footing that the leading canton
acted for the other as well as for itself in its external relations
and stipulated for it in state-treaties, while the dependent canton
bound itself to render military service and sometimes also to pay
a tribute.  In this way a series of separate leagues arose;
but there was no leading canton for all Gaul--no tie, however
loose, combining the nation as a whole.

The Belgic League
The Maritime Cantons
The Leagues of Central Gaul

It has been already mentioned(20) that the Romans
at the commencement of their Transalpine conquests found in the north
a Britanno-Belgic league under the leadership of the Suessiones,
and in central and southern Gaul the confederation of the Arverni,
with which latter the Haedui, although having a weaker body
of clients, carried on a rivalry.  In Caesar's time we find the Belgae
in north-eastern Gaul between the Seine and the Rhine still forming
such an association, which, however, apparently no longer extends
to Britain; by their side there appears, in the modern Normandy
and Brittany, the league of the Aremorican or the maritime cantons:
in central or proper Gaul two parties as formerly contended
for the hegemony, the one headed by the Haedui, the other by the Sequani
after the Arvernians weakened by the wars with Rome had retired.
These different confederacies subsisted independently side by side;
the leading states of central Gaul appear never to have extended
their clientship to the north-east nor, seriously, perhaps even
to the north-west of Gaul.

Character of Those Leagues

The impulse of the nation towards freedom found doubtless a certain
gratification in these cantonal unions; but they were in every
respect unsatisfactory.  The union was of the loosest kind, constantly
fluctuating between alliance and hegemony; the representation
of the whole body in peace by the federal diets, in war
by the general,(21) was in the highest degree feeble. The Belgian
confederacy alone seems to have been bound together somewhat
more firmly; the national enthusiasm, from which the successful
repulse of the Cimbri proceeded,(22) may have proved beneficial
to it.  The rivalries for the hegemony made a breach in every
league, which time did not close but widened, because the victory
of one competitor still left his opponent in possession
of political existence, and it always remained open to him,
even though he had submitted to clientship, subsequently to renew
the struggle.  The rivalry among the more powerful cantons not only
set these at variance, but spread into every dependent clan,
into every village, often indeed into every house, for each individual
chose his side according to his personal relations.  As Hellas
exhausted its strength not so much in the struggle of Athens against
Sparta as in the internal strife of the Athenian and Lacedaemonian
factions in every dependent community, and even in Athens itself,
so the rivalry of the Arverni and Haedui with its repetitions
on a smaller and smaller scale destroyed the Celtic people.

The Celtic Military System
Cavalry

The military capability of the nation felt the reflex influence
of these political and social relations.  The cavalry was throughout
the predominant arm; alongside of which among the Belgae, and still
more in the British islands, the old national war-chariots appear
in remarkable perfection.  These equally numerous and efficient
bands of combatants on horseback and in chariots were formed
from the nobility and its vassals; for the nobles had a genuine knightly
delight in dogs and horses, and were at much expense to procure
noble horses of foreign breed.  It is characteristic of the spirit
and the mode of fighting of these nobles that, when the levy
was called out, whoever could keep his seat on horseback,
even the gray-haired old man, took the field, and that, when on the point
of beginning a combat with an enemy of whom they made little account,
they swore man by man that they would keep aloof from house
and homestead, unless their band should charge at least twice through
the enemy's line.  Among the hired warriors the free-lance spirit
prevailed with all its demoralized and stolid indifference towards
their own life and that of others.  This is apparent from the stories--
however anecdotic their colouring--of the Celtic custom of tilting
by way of sport and now and then fighting for life or death
at a banquet, and of the usage (which prevailed among the Celts,
and outdid even the Roman gladiatorial games) of selling themselves
to be killed for a set sum of money or a number of casks of wine,
and voluntarily accepting the fatal blow stretched on their shield
before the eyes of the whole multitude.

Infantry

By the side of these mounted warriors the infantry fell
into the background.  In the main it essentially resembled the bands
of Celts, with whom the Romans had fought in Italy and Spain.
The large shield was, as then, the principal weapon of defence;
among the offensive arms, on the other hand, the long thrusting
lance now played the chief part in room of the sword.  Where several
cantons waged war in league, they naturally encamped and fought clan
against clan; there is no trace of their giving to the levy of each
canton military organization and forming smaller and more regular
tactical subdivisions.  A long train of waggons still dragged
the baggage of the Celtic army; instead of an entrenched camp, such as
the Romans pitched every night, the poor substitute of a barricade
of waggons still sufficed.  In the case of certain cantons,
such as the Nervii, the efficiency of their infantry is noticed
as exceptional; it is remarkable that these had no cavalry,
and perhaps were not even a Celtic but an immigrant German tribe.
But in general the Celtic infantry of this period appears
as an unwarlike and unwieldy levy en masse; most of all
in the more southern provinces, where along with barbarism valour
had also disappeared.  The Celt, says Caesar, ventures not to face
the German in battle.  The Roman general passed a censure
still more severe than this judgment on the Celtic infantry,
seeing that, after having become acquainted with them
in his first campaign, he never again employed them
in connection with Roman infantry.

Stage of Development of the Celtic Civilization

If we survey the whole condition of the Celts as Caesar found it
in the Transalpine regions, there is an unmistakeable advance
in civilization, as compared with the stage of culture at which
the Celts came before us a century and a half previously in the valley
of the Po.  Then the militia, excellent of its kind, thoroughly
preponderated in their armies;(23) now the cavalry occupies
the first place.  Then the Celts dwelt in open villages; now well-
constructed walls surrounded their townships.  The objects too
found in the tombs of Lombardy are, especially as respects articles
of copper and glass, far inferior to those of northern Gaul.
Perhaps the most trustworthy measure of the increase of culture
is the sense of a common relationship in the nation; so little
of it comes to light in the Celtic battles fought on the soil of what
is now Lombardy, while it strikingly appears in the struggles
against Caesar.  To all appearance the Celtic nation, when Caesar
encountered it, had already reached the maximum of the culture
allotted to it, and was even now on the decline.  The civilization
of the Transalpine Celts in Caesar's time presents, even for us
who are but very imperfectly informed regarding it, several aspects
that are estimable, and yet more that are interesting; in some
respects it is more akin to the modern than to the Hellenic-Roman
culture, with its sailing vessels, its knighthood, its ecclesiastical
constitution, above all with its attempts, however imperfect,
to build the state not on the city, but on the tribe and in a higher
degree on the nation.  But just because we here meet the Celtic nation
at the culminating point of its development, its lesser degree
of moral endowment or, which is the same thing, its lesser
capacity of culture, comes more distinctly into view.
It was unable to produce from its own resources either a national
art or a national state; it attained at the utmost a national theology
and a peculiar type of nobility.  The original simple valour
was no more; the military courage based on higher morality and judicious
organization, which comes in the train of increased civilization,
had only made its appearance in a very stunted form among
the knights.  Barbarism in the strict sense was doubtless outlived;
the times had gone by, when in Gaul the fat haunch was assigned
to the bravest of the guests, but each of his fellow-guests who thought
himself offended thereby was at liberty to challenge the receiver
on that score to combat, and when the most faithful retainers
of a deceased chief were burnt along with him.  But human sacrifices
still continued, and the maxim of law, that torture was inadmissible
in the case of the free man but allowable in that of the free
woman as well as of slaves, throws a far from pleasing light
on the position which the female sex held among the Celts
even in their period of culture.  The Celts had lost the advantages
which specially belong to the primitive epoch of nations, but had not
acquired those which civilization brings with it when it intimately
and thoroughly pervades a people.

External Relations
Celts and Iberians

Such was the internal condition of the Celtic nation.  It remains
that we set forth their external relations with their neighbours,
and describe the part which they sustained at this moment in the mighty
rival race and rival struggle of the nations, in which it is
everywhere still more difficult to maintain than to acquire.
Along the Pyrenees the relations of the peoples had for long been
peaceably settled, and the times had long gone by when the Celts
there pressed hard on, and to some extent supplanted, the Iberian,
that is, the Basque, original population.  The valleys of the Pyrenees
as well as the mountains of Bearn and Gascony, and also the coast-
steppes to the south of the Garonne, were at the time of Caesar
in the undisputed possession of the Aquitani, a great number
of small tribes of Iberian descent, coming little into contact
with each other and still less with the outer world; in this quarter
only the mouth of the Garonne with the important port of Burdigala
(Bordeaux) was in the hands of a Celtic tribe, the Bituriges-Vivisci.

Celts and Romans
Advance of Roman Trade and Commerce into Free Gaul

Of far greater importance was the contact of the Celtic nation
with the Roman people, and with the Germans.  We need not here repeat--
what has been related already--how the Romans in their slow advance
had gradually pressed back the Celts, had at last occupied the belt
of coast between the Alps and the Pyrenees, and had thereby totally
cut them off from Italy, Spain and the Mediterranean Sea--a catastrophe,
for which the way had already been prepared centuries before
by the laying out of the Hellenic stronghold at the mouth
of the Rhone.  But we must here recall the fact that it was not merely
the superiority of the Roman arms which pressed hard on the Celts,
but quite as much that of Roman culture, which likewise reaped
the ultimate benefit of the respectable beginnings of Hellenic
civilization in Gaul.  Here too, as so often happens, trade
and commerce paved the way for conquest.  The Celt after northern
fashion was fond of fiery drinks; the fact that like the Scythian
he drank the generous wine unmingled and to intoxication,
excited the surprise and the disgust of the temperate southern;
but the trader has no objection to deal with such customers.
Soon the trade with Gaul became a mine of gold for the Italian merchant;
it was nothing unusual there for a jar of wine to be exchanged
for a slave.  Other articles of luxury, such as Italian horses,
found advantageous sale in Gaul.  There were instances even already
of Roman burgesses acquiring landed property beyond the Roman
frontier, and turning it to profit after the Italian fashion;
there is mention, for example, of Roman estates in the canton
of the Segusiavi (near Lyons) as early as about 673.  Beyond doubt it
was a consequence of this that, as already mentioned(24) in free Gaul
itself, e. g. among the Arverni, the Roman language was not unknown
even before the conquest; although this knowledge was presumably
still restricted to few, and even the men of rank in the allied
canton of the Haedui had to be conversed with through interpreters.
Just as the traffickers in fire-water and the squatters led the way
in the occupation of North America, so these Roman wine-traders
and landlords paved the way for, and beckoned onward, the future
conqueror of Gaul.  How vividly this was felt even on the opposite
side, is shown by the prohibition which one of the most energetic
tribes of Gaul, the canton of the Nervii, like some German peoples,
issued against trafficking with the Romans.

Celts and Germans

Still more violent even than the pressure of the Romans
from the Mediterranean was that of the Germans downward from the Baltic
and the North Sea--a fresh stock from the great cradle of peoples
in the east, which made room for itself by the side of its elder
brethren with youthful vigour, although also with youthful
rudeness.  Though the tribes of this stock dwelling nearest
to the Rhine--the Usipetes, Tencteri, Sugambri, Ubii--had begun to be
in some degree civilized, and had at least ceased voluntarily
to change their abodes, all accounts yet agree that farther inland
agriculture was of little importance, and the several tribes
had hardly yet attained fixed abodes.  It is significant
in this respect that their western neighbours at this time hardly knew
how to name any one of the peoples of the interior of Germany
by its cantonal name; these were only known to them under the general
appellations of the Suebi, that is, the roving people or nomads,
and the Marcomani, that is, the land-guard(25)--names which were
hardly cantonal names in Caesar's time, although they appeared
as such to the Romans and subsequently became in various cases
names of cantons.

The Right Bank of the Rhine Lost to the Celts

The most violent onset of this great nation fell upon the Celts.
The struggles, in which the Germans probably engaged with the Celts
for the possession of the regions to the east of the Rhine, are
wholly withdrawn from our view.  We are only able to perceive,
that about the end of the seventh century of Rome all the land
as far as the Rhine was already lost to the Celts; that the Boii,
who were probably once settled in Bavaria and Bohemia,(26) were homeless
wanderers; and that even the Black Forest formerly possessed
by the Helvetii,(27) if not yet taken possession of by the German tribes
dwelling in the vicinity, was at least waste debateable border-
land, and was presumably even then, what it was afterwards called,
the Helvetian desert The barbarous strategy of the Germans--which
secured them from hostile attacks by laying waste the neighbourhood
for miles--seems to have been applied here on the greatest scale.

German Tribes on the Left Bank of the Rhine

But the Germans had not remained stationary at the Rhine.
The march of the Cimbrian and Teutonic host, composed, as respects
its flower, of German tribes, which had swept with such force fifty
years before over Pannonia, Gaul, Italy, and Spain, seemed to have
been nothing but a grand reconnaissance.  Already different German
tribes had formed permanent settlements to the west of the Rhine,
especially of its lower course; having intruded as conquerors,
these settlers continued to demand hostages and to levy annual
tribute from the Gallic inhabitants in their neighbourhood,
as if from subjects.  Among these German tribes were the Aduatuci,
who from a fragment of the Cimbrian horde(28) had grown
into a considerable canton, and a number of other tribes afterwards
comprehended under the name of the Tungri on the Maas in the region
of Liege; even the Treveri (about Treves) and the Nervii
(in Hainault), two of the largest and most powerful peoples
of this region, are directly designated by respectable authorities
as Germans.  The complete credibility of these accounts must certainly
remain doubtful, since, as Tacitus remarks in reference to the two
peoples last mentioned, it was subsequently, at least in these regions,
reckoned an honour to be descended of German blood and not to belong
to the little-esteemed Celtic nation; yet the population
in the region of the Scheldt, Maas, and Moselle seems certainly
to have become, in one way or another, largely mingled with German
elements, or at any rate to have come under German influences.
The German settlements themselves were perhaps small;
they were not unimportant, for amidst the chaotic obscurity,
through which we see the stream of peoples on the right bank
of the Rhine ebbing and flowing about this period, we can well perceive
that larger German hordes were preparing to cross the Rhine in the track
of these advanced posts.  Threatened on two sides by foreign domination
and torn by internal dissension, it was scarcely to be expected
that the unhappy Celtic nation would now rally and save itself
by its own vigour.  Dismemberment, and decay in virtue of dismemberment,
had hitherto been its history; how should a nation, which could
name no day like those of Marathon and Salamis, of Aricia and the Raudine
plain--a nation which, even in its time of vigour, had made
no attempt to destroy Massilia by a united effort--now when evening
had come, defend itself against so formidable foes?

The Roman Policy with Reference to the German Invasion

The less the Celts, left to themselves, were a match for the Germans,
the more reason had the Romans carefully to watch over the complications
in which the two nations might be involved.  Although the movements
thence arising had not up to the present time directly affected
them, they and their most important interests were yet concerned
in the issue of those movements.  As may readily be conceived,
the internal demeanour of the Celtic nation had become speedily
and permanently influenced by its outward relations.  As in Greece
the Lacedaemonian party combined with Persia against the Athenians,
so the Romans from their first appearance beyond the Alps had found
a support against the Arverni, who were then the ruling power among
the southern Celts, in their rivals for the hegemony, the Haedui:
and with the aid of these new "brothers of the Roman nation" they had
not merely reduced to subjection the Allobroges and a great portion
of the indirect territory of the Arverni, but had also, in the Gaul
that remained free, occasioned by their influence the transference
of the hegemony from the Arverni to these Haedui.  But while the Greeks
were threatened with danger to their nationality only from one side,
the Celts found themselves hard pressed simultaneously by two
national foes; and it was natural that they should seek from the one
protection against the other, and that, if the one Celtic party
attached itself to the Romans, their opponents should
on the contrary form alliance with the Germans.  This course
was most natural for the Belgae, who were brought by neighbourhood
and manifold intermixture into closer relation to the Germans who had
crossed the Rhine, and moreover, with their less-developed culture,
probably felt themselves at least as much akin to the Suebian
of alien race as to their cultivated Allobrogian or Helvetic
countryman.  But the southern Celts also, among whom now
as already mentioned, the considerable canton of the Sequani
(about Besangon) stood at the head of the party hostile to the Romans,
had every reason at this very time to call in the Germans against
the Romans who immediately threatened them; the remiss government
of the senate and the signs of the revolution preparing in Rome,
which had not remained unknown to the Celts, made this very moment
seem suitable for ridding themselves of the Roman influence
and primarily for humbling the Roman clients, the Haedui.  A rupture
had taken place between the two cantons respecting the tolls
on the Saone, which separated the territory of the Haedui
from that of the Sequani, and about the year 683 the German prince
Ariovistus with some 15,000 armed men had crossed the Rhine
as condottiere of the Sequani.

Ariovistus on the Middle Rhine

The war was prolonged for some years with varying success;
on the whole the results were unfavourable to the Haedui.  Their leader
Eporedorix at length called out their whole clients, and marched
forth with an enormous superiority of force against the Germans.
These obstinately refused battle, and kept themselves under cover
of morasses and forests.  It was not till the clans, weary
of waiting, began to break up and disperse, that the Germans appeared
in the open field, and then Ariovistus compelled a battle
at Admagetobriga, in which the flower of the cavalry of the Haedui
were left on the field.  The Haedui, forced by this defeat
to conclude peace on the terms which the victor proposed, were obliged
to renounce the hegemony, and to consent with their whole adherents
to become clients of the Sequani; they had to bind themselves
to pay tribute to the Sequani or rather to Ariovistus, and to furnish
the children of their principal nobles as hostages; and lastly
they had to swear that they would never demand back these hostages
nor invoke the intervention of the Romans.

Inaction of the Romans

This peace was concluded apparently about 693.(29)  Honour
and advantage enjoined the Romans to come forward in opposition to it;
the noble Haeduan Divitiacus, the head of the Roman party in his clan,
and for that reason now banished by his countrymen, went in person
to Rome to solicit their intervention.  A still more serious
warning was the insurrection of the Allobroges in 693(30)--
the neighbours of the Sequani--which was beyond doubt connected
with these events.  In reality orders were issued to the Gallic
governors to assist the Haedui; they talked of sending consuls
and consular armies over the Alps; but the senate, to whose decision
these affairs primarily fell, at length here also crowned great
words with little deeds.  The insurrection of the Allobroges
was suppressed by arms, but nothing was done for the Haedui;
on the contrary, Ariovistus was even enrolled in 695 in the list
of kings friendly with the Romans.(31)

Foundation of a German Empire in Gaul

The German warrior-prince naturally took this as a renunciation
by the Romans of the Celtic land which they had not occupied;
he accordingly took up his abode there, and began to establish
a German principality on Gallic soil.  It was his intention that
the numerous bands which he had brought with him, and the still
more numerous bands that afterwards followed at his call from home--
it was reckoned that up to 696 some 120,000 Germans had crossed
the Rhine--this whole mighty immigration of the German nation,
which poured through the once opened sluices like a stream over
the beautiful west, should become settled there and form a basis
on which he might build his dominion over Gaul.  The extent
of the German settlements which he called into existence
on the left bank of the Rhine cannot be determined; beyond doubt
it was great, and his projects were far greater still.  The Celts
were treated by him as a wholly subjugated nation, and no distinction
was made between the several cantons.  Even the Sequani, as whose hired
commander-in-chief he had crossed the Rhine, were obliged, as if they
were vanquished enemies, to cede to him for his people a third
of their territory--presumably upper Alsace afterwards inhabited
by the Triboci--where Ariovistus permanently settled with his followers;
nay, as if this were not enough, a second third was afterwards
demanded of them for the Harudes who arrived subsequently.
Ariovistus seemed as if he wished to take up in Gaul the part
of Philip of Macedonia, and to play the master over the Celts
who were friendly to the Germans no less than over those
who adhered to the Romans.

The Germans on the Lower Rhine
The Germans on the Upper Rhine
Spread of the Helvetian Invasion to the Interior of Gaul

The appearance of the energetic German prince in so dangerous
proximity, which could not but in itself excite the most serious
apprehension in the Romans, appeared still more threatening,
inasmuch as it stood by no means alone.  The Usipetes and Tencteri
settled on the right bank of the Rhine, weary of the incessant
devastation of their territory by the overbearing Suebian tribes,
had, the year before Caesar arrived in Gaul (695), set out
from their previous abodes to seek others at the mouth of the Rhine.
They had already taken away from the Menapii there the portion
of their territory situated on the right bank, and it might be
foreseen that they would make the attempt to establish themselves
also on the left.  Suebian bands, moreover, assembled between
Cologne and Mayence, and threatened to appear as uninvited guests
in the opposite Celtic canton of the Treveri.  Lastly,
the territory of the most easterly clan of the Celts, the warlike
and numerous Helvetii, was visited with growing frequency
by the Germans, so that the Helvetii, who perhaps even apart from this
were suffering from over-population through the reflux of their
settlers from the territory which they had lost to the north
of the Rhine, and besides were liable to be completely isolated
from their kinsmen by the settlement of Ariovistus in the territory
of the Sequani, conceived the desperate resolution of voluntarily
evacuating the territory hitherto in their possession to the Germans,
and acquiring larger and more fertile abodes to the west
of the Jura, along with, if possible, the hegemony in the interior
of Gaul--a plan which some of their districts had already formed
and attempted to execute during the Cimbrian invasion.(32)
the Rauraci whose territory (Basle and southern Alsace) was similarly
threatened, the remains, moreover, of the Boii who had already
at an earlier period been compelled by the Germans to forsake their
homes and were now unsettled wanderers, and other smaller tribes,
made common cause with the Helvetii.  As early as 693 their flying
parties came over the Jura and even as far as the Roman province;
their departure itself could not be much longer delayed; inevitably
German settlers would then advance into the important region
between the lakes of Constance and Geneva forsaken by its defenders.
From the sources of the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean the German tribes
were in motion; the whole line of the Rhine was threatened by them;
it was a moment like that when the Alamanni and the Franks
threw themselves on the falling empire of the Caesars;
and even now there seemed on the eve of being carried into effect
against the Celts that very movement which was successful
five hundred years afterwards against the Romans.

Caesar Proceeds to Gaul
Caesar's Army

Under these circumstances the new governor Gaius Caesar arrived
in the spring of 696 in Narbonese Gaul, which had been added by decree
of the senate to his original province embracing Cisalpine Gaul
along with Istria and Dalmatia.  His office, which was committed
to him first for five years (to the end of 700), then in 699
for five more (to the end of 705), gave him the right to nominate
ten lieutenants of propraetorian rank, and (at least according to
his own interpretation) to fill up his legions, or even to form
new ones at his discretion out of the burgess-population--who were
especially numerous in Cisalpine Gaul--of the territory under his
sway.  The army, which he received in the two provinces, consisted,
as regards infantry of the line, of four legions trained and inured
to war, the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth, or at the utmost
24,000 men, to which fell to be added, as usual, the contingents
of the subjects.  The cavalry and light-armed troops, moreover,
were represented by horsemen from Spain, and by Numidian, Cretan,
and Balearic archers and slingers.  The staff of Caesar--the elite
of the democracy of the capital--contained, along with not a few
useless young men of rank, some able officers, such as Publius
Crassus the younger son of the old political ally of Caesar,
and Titus Labienus, who followed the chief of the democracy
as a faithful adjutant from the Forum to the battle-field.
Caesar had not received definite instructions; to one
who was discerning and courageous these were implied
in the circumstances with which he had to deal.  Here too
the negligence of the senate had to be retrieved, and first of all
the stream of migration of the German peoples had to be checked.

Repulse of the Helvetii

Just at this time the Helvetic invasion, which was closely
interwoven with the German and had been in preparation for years,
began.  That they might not make a grant of their abandoned huts
to the Germans and might render their own return impossible,
the Helvetii had burnt their towns and villages; and their long
trains of waggons, laden with women, children, and the best part
of their moveables, arrived from all sides at the Leman lake near
Genava (Geneva), where they and their comrades had fixed their
rendezvous for the 28th of March(33) of this year.  According
to their own reckoning the whole body consisted of 368,000 persons,
of whom about a fourth part were able to bear arms.  As the mountain
chain of the Jura, stretching from the Rhine to the Rhone, almost
completely closed in the Helvetic country towards the west,
and its narrow defiles were as ill adapted for the passage
of such a caravan as they were well adapted for defence, the leaders
had resolved to go round in a southerly direction, and to open up
for themselves a way to the west at the point, where the Rhone
has broken through the mountain-chain between the south-western
and highest part of the Jura and the Savoy mountains, near
the modern Fort de l'Ecluse.  But on the right bank here the rocks
and precipices come so close to the river that there remained only
a narrow path which could easily be blocked up, and the Sequani,
to whom this bank belonged, could with ease intercept the route
of the Helvetii.  They preferred therefore to pass over, above the point
where the Rhone breaks through, to the left Allobrogian bank,
with the view of regaining the right bank further down the stream
where the Rhone enters the plain, and then marching on towards
the level west of Gaul; there the fertile canton of the Santones
(Saintonge, the valley of the Charente) on the Atlantic Ocean
was selected by the wanderers for their new abode.  This march led,
where it touched the left bank of the Rhone, through Roman territory;
and Caesar, otherwise not disposed to acquiesce in the establishment
of the Helvetii in western Gaul, was firmly resolved not to permit
their passage.  But of his four legions three were stationed far
off at Aquileia; although he called out in haste the militia
of the Transalpine province, it seemed scarcely possible with so small
a force to hinder the innumerable Celtic host from crossing
the Rhone, between its exit from the Leman lake at Geneva
and the point of its breaking through the mountains, over a distance
of more than fourteen miles.  Caesar, however, by negotiations
with the Helvetii, who would gladly have effected by peaceable means
the crossing of the river and the march through the Allobrogian
territory, gained a respite of fifteen days, which was employed
in breaking down the bridge over the Rhone at Genava, and barring
the southern bank of the Rhone against the enemy by an entrenchment
nearly nineteen miles long: it was the first application
of the system--afterwards carried out on so immense a scale
by the Romans--of guarding the frontier of the empire in a military point
of view by a chain of forts placed in connection with each other
by ramparts and ditches.  The attempts of the Helvetii to gain
the other bank at different places in boats or by means of fords
were successfully frustrated by the Romans in these lines,
and the Helvetii were compelled to desist from the passage of the Rhone.

The Helvetii Move towards Gaul

On the other hand, the party in Gaul hostile to the Romans,
which hoped to obtain a powerful reinforcement in the Helvetii,
more especially the Haeduan Dumnorix brother of Divitiacus,
and at the head of the national party in his canton as the latter
wasat the head of the Romans, procured for them a passage
through the passes of the Jura and the territory of the Sequani.
The Romans had no legal title to forbid this; but other and higher
interestswereat stake for them in the Helvetic expedition than
the question of the formal integrity of the Roman territory-- interests
which could only be guarded, if Caesar, instead of confining himself,
as all the governors of the senate and even Marius(34) had done,
to the modest task of watching the frontier, should cross what had hitherto
been the frontier at the head of a considerable army.  Caesar was general
not of the senate, but of the state; he showed no hesitation.
He had immediately proceeded from Genava in person to Italy,
and with characteristic speed brought up the three legions
cantoned there as well as two newly-formed legions of recruits.

The Helvetian War

These troops he united with the corps stationed at Genava,
and crossed the Rhone with his whole force.  His unexpected appearance
in the territory of the Haedui naturally at once restored the Roman
party there to power, which was not unimportant as regarded
supplies.  He found the Helvetii employed in crossing the Saone,
and moving from the territory of the Sequani into that
of the Haedui; those of them that were still on the left bank
of the Saone, especially the corps of the Tigorini, were caught
and destroyed by the Romans rapidly advancing.  The bulk
of the expedition, however, had already crossed to the right bank
of the river; Caesar followed them and in twenty-four hours effected
the passage, which the unwieldy host of the Helvetii had not been able
to accomplish in twenty days.  The Helvetii, prevented by this passage
of the river on the part of the Roman army from continuing
their march westward, turned in a northerly direction, doubtless
under the supposition that Caesar would not venture to follow them
far into the interior of Gaul, and with the intention, if he should
desist from following them, of turning again toward their proper
destination.  For fifteen days the Roman army marched behind
that of the enemy at a distance of about four miles, clinging
to its rear, and hoping for an advantageous opportunity of assailing
the Helvetic host under conditions favourable to victory,
and destroying it.  But this moment came not: unwieldy as was the march
of the Helvetic caravan, the leaders knew how to guard against
a surprise, and appeared to be copiously provided with supplies
as well as most accurately informed by their spies of every event
in the Roman camp.  On the other hand the Romans began to suffer
from want of necessaries, especially when the Helvetii removed
from the Saone and the means of river-transport ceased.  The non-arrival
of the supplies promised by the Haedui, from which this embarrassment
primarily arose, excited the more suspicion, as both armies
were still moving about in their territory.  Moreover the considerable
Roman cavalry, numbering almost 4000 horse, proved utterly
untrustworthy--which doubtless admitted of explanation,
for they consisted almost wholly of Celtic horsemen, especially
of the mounted retainers of the Haedui, under the command of Dumnorix
the well-known enemy of the Romans, and Caesar himself had taken
them over still more as hostages than as soldiers.  There was good
reason to believe that a defeat which they suffered at the hands
of the far weaker Helvetic cavalry was occasioned by themselves,
and that the enemy was informed by them of all occurrences
in the Roman camp.  The position of Caesar grew critical; it was
becoming disagreeably evident, how much the Celtic patriot party
could effect even with the Haedui in spite of their official
alliance with Rome, and of the distinctive interests of this canton
inclining it towards the Romans; what was to be the issue, if they
ventured deeper and deeper into a country full of excitement,
and if they removed daily farther from their means of communication?
The armies were just marching past Bibracte (Autun), the capital
of the Haedui, at a moderate distance; Caesar resolved to seize
this important place by force before he continued his march
into the interior; and it is very possible, that he intended to desist
altogether from farther pursuit and to establish himself
in Bibracte.  But when he ceased from the pursuit and turned
against Bibracte, the Helvetii thought that the Romans were making
preparations for flight, and now attacked in their turn.

Battle at Bibracte

Caesar desired nothing better.  The two armies posted themselves
on two parallel chains of hills; the Celts began the engagement,
broke up the Roman cavalry which had advanced into the plain,
and rushed on against the Roman legions posted on the slope of the hill,
but were there obliged to give way before Caesar's veterans.
When the Romans thereupon, following up their advantage, descended
in their turn to the plain, the Celts again advanced against them,
and a reserved Celtic corps took them at the same time in flank.
The reserve of the Roman attacking column was pushed forward
against the latter; it forced it away from the main body towards
the baggage and the barricade of waggons, where it was destroyed.
The bulk of the Helvetic host was at length brought to give way,
and compelled to beat a retreat in an easterly direction--the opposite
of that towards which their expedition led them.  This day had
frustrated the scheme of the Helvetii to establish for themselves
new settlements on the Atlantic Ocean, and handed them over
to the pleasure of the victor; but it had been a hot day also
for the conquerors.  Caesar, who had reason for not altogether trusting
his staff of officers, had at the very outset sent away
all the officers' horses, so as to make the necessity of holding
their ground thoroughly clear to his troops; in fact the battle,
had the Romans lost it, would have probably brought about
the annihilation of the Roman army.  The Roman troops
were too much exhausted to pursue the conquered with vigour;
but in consequence of the proclamation of Caesar that he would
treat all who should support the Helvetii as like the Helvetii
themselves enemies of the Romans, all support was refused
to the beaten army whithersoever it went-- in the first instance,
in the canton of the Lingones (about Langres)--and, deprived
of all supplies and of their baggage and burdened by the mass
of camp-followers incapable of fighting, they were under the necessity
of submitting to the Roman general.

The Helvetii Sent back to Their Original Abode

The lot of the vanquished was a comparatively mild one.
The Haedui were directed to concede settlements in their territory
to the homeless Boii; and this settlement of the conquered foe
in the midst of the most powerful Celtic cantons rendered almost
the services of a Roman colony.  The survivors of the Helvetii
and Rauraci, something more than a third of the men that had marched
forth, were naturally sent back to their former territory.
It was incorporated with the Roman province, but the inhabitants
were admitted to alliance with Rome under favourable conditions,
in order to defend, under Roman supremacy, the frontier along
the upper Rhine against the Germans.  Only the south-western point
of the Helvetic canton was directly taken into the possession
of the Romans, and there subsequently, on the charming shore
of the Leman lake, the old Celtic town Noviodunum (now Nyon)
was converted into a Roman frontier-fortress,
the "Julian equestrian colony."(35)

Caesar and Ariovistus
Negotiations

Thus the threatening invasion of the Germans on the upper Rhine
was obviated, and, at the same time, the party hostile to the Romans
among the Celts was humbled.  On the middle Rhine also,
where the Germans had already crossed years ago, and where the power
of Ariovistus which vied with that of Rome in Gaul was daily
spreading, there was need of similar action, and the occasion
for a rupture was easily found.  In comparison with the yoke threatened
or already imposed on them by Ariovistus, the Roman supremacy probably
now appeared to the greater part of the Celts in this quarter
the lesser evil; the minority, who retained their hatred
of the Romans, had at least to keep silence.  A diet of the Celtic
tribes of central Gaul, held under Roman influence, requested
the Roman general in name of the Celtic nation for aid against
the Germans.  Caesar consented.  At his suggestion the Haedui stopped
the payment of the tribute stipulated to be paid to Ariovistus,
and demanded back the hostages furnished; and when Ariovistus
on account of this breach of treaty attacked the clients of Rome,
Caesar took occasion thereby to enter into direct negotiation
with him and specially to demand, in addition to the return
of the hostages and a promise to keep peace with the Haedui,
that Ariovistus should bind himself to allure no more Germans
over the Rhine.  The German general replied to the Roman, in the full
consciousness of equality of rights, that northern Gaul had become
subject to him by right of war as fairly as southern Gaul
to the Romans; and that, as he did not hinder the Romans from taking
tribute from the Allobroges, so they should not prevent him
from taxing his subjects.  In later secret overtures it appeared
that the prince was well aware of the circumstances of the Romans;
he mentioned the invitations which had been addressed to him from Rome
to put Caesar out of the way, and offered, if Caesar would leave
to him northern Gaul, to assist him in turn to obtain the sovereignty
of Italy--as the party-quarrels of the Celtic nation had opened up
an entrance for him into Gaul, he seemed to expect from the party-
quarrels of the Italian nation the consolidation of his rule there.
For centuries no such language of power completely on a footing
of equality and bluntly and carelessly expressing its independence had
been held in presence of the Romans, as was now heard from the king
of the German host; he summarily refused to come, when the Roman
general suggested that he should appear personally before him
according to the usual practice with client-princes.

Ariovistus Attacked
And Beaten

It was the more necessary not to delay; Caesar immediately set out
against Ariovistus.  A panic seized his troops, especially his officers
when they were to measure their strength with the flower
of the German troops that for fourteen years had not come
under shelter of a roof: it seemed as if the deep decay of Roman moral
and military discipline would assert itself and provoke desertion
and mutiny even in Caesar's camp.  But the general, while declaring
that in case of need he would march with the tenth legion alone
against the enemy, knew not merely how to influence these
by such an appeal to honour, but also how to bind the other regiments
to their eagles by warlike emulation, and to inspire the troops
with something of his own energy.  Without leaving them time
for reflection, he led them onward in rapid marches, and fortunately
anticipated Ariovistus in the occupation of Vesontio (Besancon),
the capital of the Sequani.  A personal conference between the two
generals, which took place at the request of Ariovistus, seemed
as if solely meant to cover an attempt against the person of Caesar;
arms alone could decide between the two oppressors of Gaul.  The war
came temporarily to a stand.  In lower Alsace somewhere in the region
of Muhlhausen, five miles from the Rhine,(36) the two armies
lay at a little distance from each other, till Ariovistus
with his very superior force succeeded in marching past the Roman camp,
placing himself in its rear, and cutting off the Romans
from their base and their supplies.  Caesar attempted to free himself
from his painful situation by a battle; but Ariovistus did not accept it.
Nothing remained for the Roman general but, in spite of
his inferior strength, to imitate the movement of the Germans,
and to recover his communications by making two legions march past
the enemy and take up a position beyond the camp of the Germans,
while four legions remained behind in the former camp.  Ariovistus,
when he saw the Romans divided, attempted an assault on their lesser
camp; but the Romans repulsed it.  Under the impression made
by this success, the whole Roman army was brought forward
to the attack; and the Germans also placed themselves in battle array,
in a long line, each tribe for itself, the cars of the army
with the baggage and women being placed behind them to render flight
more difficult.  The right wing of the Romans, led by Caesar himself,
threw itself rapidly on the enemy, and drove them before it;
the right wing of the Germans was in like manner successful.
The balance still stood equal; but the tactics of the reserve,
which had decided so many other conflicts with barbarians, decided
the conflict with the Germans also in favour of the Romans;
their third line, which Publius Crassus seasonably sent to render help,
restored the battle on the left wing and thereby decided
the victory.  The pursuit was continued to the Rhine; only a few,
including the king, succeeded in escaping to the other bank (696).

German Settlements on the Left Bank of the Rhine

Thus brilliantly the Roman rule announced its advent to the mighty
stream, which the Italian soldiers here saw for the first time;
by a single fortunate battle the line of the Rhine was won.
The fate of the German settlements on the left bank of the Rhine
lay in the hands of Caesar; the victor could destroy them,
but he did not do so.  The neighbouring Celtic cantons--the Sequani,
Leuci, Mediomatrici--were neither capable of self-defence
nor trustworthy; the transplanted Germans promised to become
not merely brave guardians of the frontier but also better subjects
of Rome, for their nationality severed them from the Celts,
and their own interest in the preservation of their newly-won
settlements severed them from their countrymen across the Rhine,
so that in their isolated position they could not avoid adhering
to the central power.  Caesar here, as everywhere, preferred
conquered foes to doubtful friends; he left the Germans settled
by Ariovistus along the left bank of the Rhine--the Triboci
about Strassburg, the Nemetes about Spires, the Vangiones
about Worms--in possession of their new abodes, and entrusted them
with the guarding of the Rhine-frontier against their countrymen.(37)
The Suebi, who threatened the territory of the Treveri on the middle
Rhine, on receiving news of the defeat of Ariovistus, again retreated
into the interior of Germany; on which occasion they sustained
considerable loss by the way at the hands of the adjoining tribes.

The Rhine Boundary

The consequences of this one campaign were immense; they were felt
for many centuries after.  The Rhine had become the boundary
of the Roman empire against the Germans.  In Gaul, which was no longer
able to govern itself, the Romans had hitherto ruled on the south
coast, while lately the Germans had attempted to establish themselves
farther up.  The recent events had decided that Gaul was to succumb
not merely in part but wholly to the Roman supremacy,
and that the natural boundary presented by the mighty river was also
to become the political boundary.  The senate in its better times
had not rested, till the dominion of Rome had reached the natural
bounds of Italy--the Alps and the Mediterranean--and its adjacent
islands.  The enlarged empire also needed a similar military
rounding off; but the present government left the matter
to accident, and sought at most to see, not that the frontiers
were capable of defence, but that they should not need to be defended
directly by itself.  People felt that now another spirit
and another arm began to guide the destinies of Rome.

Subjugation of Gaul
Belgic Expedition

The foundations of the future edifice were laid; but in order
to finish the building and completely to secure the recognition
of the Roman rule by the Gauls, and that of the Rhine-frontier by
the Germans, very much still remained to be done.  All central Gaul
indeed from the Roman frontier as far up as Chartres and Treves
submitted without objection to the new ruler; and on the upper
and middle Rhine also no attack was for the present to be apprehended
from the Germans.  But the northern provinces--as well
the Aremorican cantons in Brittany and Normandy as the more powerful
confederation of the Belgae--were not affected by the blows
directed against central Gaul, and found no occasion to submit
to the conqueror of Ariovistus.  Moreover, as was already remarked,
very close relations subsisted between the Belgae and the Germans
over the Rhine, and at the mouth of the Rhine also Germanic tribes
made themselves ready to cross the stream.  In consequence of this
Caesar set out with his army, now increased to eight legions,
in the spring of 697 against the Belgic cantons.  Mindful of the brave
and successful resistance which fifty years before they had
with united strength presented to the Cimbri on the borders of their
land,(38) and stimulated by the patriots who had fled to them
in numbers from central Gaul, the confederacy of the Belgae sent
their whole first levy--300,000 armed men under the leadership of Galba
the king of the Suessiones--to their southern frontier to receive
Caesar there.  A single canton alone, that of the powerful Remi
(about Rheims) discerned in this invasion of the foreigners
an opportunity to shake off the rule which their neighbours
the Suessiones exercised over them, and prepared to take up
in the north the part which the Haedui had played in central Gaul.
The Roman and the Belgic armies arrived in their territory almost
at the same time.

Conflicts on the Aisne
Submission of the Western Cantons

Caesar did not venture to give battle to the brave enemy six times
as strong; to the north of the Aisne, not far from the modern
Pontavert between Rheims and Laon, he pitched his camp on a plateau
rendered almost unassailable on all sides partly by the river
and by morasses, partly by fosses and redoubts, and contented himself
with thwarting by defensive measures the attempts of the Belgae
to cross the Aisne and thereby to cut him off from his communications.
When he counted on the likelihood that the coalition would speedily
collapse under its own weight, he had reckoned rightly.  King Galba
was an honest man, held in universal respect; but he was not equal
to the management of an army of 300,000 men on hostile soil.
No progress was made, and provisions began to fail; discontent
and dissension began to insinuate themselves into the camp
of the confederates.  The Bellovaci in particular, equal to
the Suessiones in power, and already dissatisfied that the supreme
command of the confederate army had not fallen to them, could no longer
be detained after news had arrived that the Haedui as allies
of the Romans were making preparations to enter the Bellovacic territory.
They determined to break up and go home; though for honour's sake
all the cantons at the same time bound themselves to hasten
with their united strength to the help of the one first attacked,
the miserable dispersion of the confederacy was but miserably palliated
by such impracticable stipulations.  It was a catastrophe
which vividly reminds us of that which occurred almost
on the same spot in 1792; and, just as with the campaign in Champagne,
the defeat was all the more severe that it took place without a battle.
The bad leadership of the retreating army allowed the Roman general
to pursue it as if it were beaten, and to destroy a portion
of the contingents that had remained to the last.  But the consequences
of the victory were not confined to this.  As Caesar advanced
into the western cantons of the Belgae, one after another
gave themselves up as lost almost without resistance; the powerful
Suessiones (about Soissons), as well as their rivals, the Bellovaci
(about Beauvais) and the Ambiani (about Amiens).  The towns opened
their gates when they saw the strange besieging machines,
the towers rolling up to their walls; those who would not submit
to the foreign masters sought a refuge beyond the sea in Britain.

The Conflict with the Nervii

But in the eastern cantons the national feeling was more
energetically roused.  The Viromandui (about Arras), the Atrebates
(about St. Quentin), the German Aduatuci (about Namur), but above
all the Nervii (in Hainault) with their not inconsiderable body
of clients, little inferior in number to the Suessiones and Bellovaci,
far superior to them in valour and vigorous patriotic spirit,
concluded a second and closer league, and assembled their forces
on the upper Sambre.  Celtic spies informed them most accurately
of the movements of the Roman army; their own local knowledge,
and the high tree-barricades which were formed everywhere in these
districts to obstruct the bands of mounted robbers who often
visited them, allowed the allies to conceal their own operations
for the most part from the view of the Romans.  When these arrived
on the Sambre not far from Bavay, and the legions were occupied
in pitching their camp on the crest of the left bank, while
the cavalry and light infantry were exploring the opposite heights,
the latter were all at once assailed by the whole mass of the enemy's
forces and driven down the hill into the river.  In a moment
the enemy had crossed this also, and stormed the heights of the left
bank with a determination that braved death.  Scarcely was there
time left for the entrenching legionaries to exchange the mattock
for the sword; the soldiers, many without helmets, had to fight
just as they stood, without line of battle, without plan, without
proper command; for, owing to the suddenness of the attack
and the intersection of the ground by tall hedges, the several
divisions had wholly lost their communications.  Instead of a battle
there arose a number of unconnected conflicts.  Labienus with the left
wing overthrew the Atrebates and pursued them even across
the river.  The Roman central division forced the Viromandui down
the declivity.  But the right wing, where the general himself
was present, was outflanked by the far more numerous Nervii
the more easily, as the central division carried away by its
own success had evacuated the ground alongside of it, and even
the half-ready camp was occupied by the Nervii; the two legions,
each separately rolled together into a dense mass and assailed
in front and on both flanks, deprived of most of their officers
and their best soldiers, appeared on the point of being broken and cut
to pieces.  The Roman camp-followers and the allied troops were already
fleeing in all directions; of the Celtic cavalry whole divisions,
like the contingent of the Treveri, galloped off at full speed,
that from the battle-field itself they might announce at home
the welcome news of the defeat which had been sustained.  Everything
was at stake.  The general himself seized his shield and fought
among the foremost; his example, his call even now inspiring enthusiasm,
induced the wavering ranks to rally.  They had already in some
measure extricated themselves and had at least restored the connection
between the two legions of this wing, when help came up--
partly down from the crest of the bank, where in the interval
the Roman rearguard with the baggage had arrived, partly
from the other bank of the river, where Labienus had meanwhile penetrated
to the enemy's camp and taken possession of it, and now, perceiving
at length the danger that menaced the right wing, despatched
the victorious tenth legion to the aid of his general.  The Nervii,
separated from their confederates and simultaneously assailed
on all sides, now showed, when fortune turned, the same heroic courage
as when they believed themselves victors; still over the pile
of corpses of their fallen comrades they fought to the last man.
According to their own statement, of their six hundred senators
only three survived this day.

Subjugation of the Belgae

After this annihilating defeat the Nervii, Atrebates, and Viromandui
could not but recognize the Roman supremacy.  The Aduatuci, who arrived
too late to take part in the fight on the Sambre, attempted still to hold
their ground in the strongest of their towns (on the mount Falhize
near the Maas not far from Huy), but they too soon submitted. A nocturnal
attack on the Roman camp in front of the town, which they ventured
after the surrender, miscarried; and the perfidy was avenged
by the Romans with fearful severity.  The clients of the Aduatuci,
consisting of the Eburones between the Maas and Rhine and other
small adjoining tribes, were declared independent by the Romans,
while the Aduatuci taken prisoners were sold under the hammer en masse
for the benefit of the Roman treasury.  It seemed as if the fate
which had befallen the Cimbri still pursued even this last
Cimbrian fragment.  Caesar contented himself with imposing
on the other subdued tribes a general disarmament and furnishing
of hostages.  The Remi became naturally the leading canton
in Belgic, like the Haedui in central Gaul; even in the latter
several clans at enmity with the Haedui preferred to rank
among the clients of the Remi.  Only the remote maritime
cantons of the Morini (Artois) and the Menapii (Flanders and Brabant),
and the country between the Scheldt and the Rhine inhabited in great
part by Germans, remained still for the present exempt from Roman
invasion and in possession of their hereditary freedom.

Expeditions against the Maritime Cantons
Venetian War

The turn of the Aremorican cantons came.  In the autumn of 697
Publius Crassus was sent thither with a Roman corps; he induced
the Veneti--who as masters of the ports of the modern Morbihan
and of a respectable fleet occupied the first place among all
the Celtic cantons in navigation and commerce--and generally
the coast-districts between the Loire and Seine, to submit
to the Romans and give them hostages.  But they soon repented.
When in the following winter (697-698) Roman officers
came to these legions to levy requisitions of grain there,
they were detained by the Veneti as counter-hostages.  The example
thus set was quickly followed not only by the Aremorican cantons,
but also by the maritime cantons of the Belgae that still remained
free; where, as in some cantons of Normandy, the common council
refused to join the insurrection, the multitude put them to death
and attached itself with redoubled zeal to the national cause.
The whole coast from the mouth of the Loire to that of the Rhine
rose against Rome; the most resolute patriots from all the Celtic
cantons hastened thither to co-operate in the great work of liberation;
they already calculated on the rising of the whole Belgic confederacy,
on aid from Britain, on the arrival of Germans from beyond the Rhine.

Caesar sent Labienus with all the cavalry to the Rhine, with a view
to hold in check the agitation in the Belgic province, and in case
of need to prevent the Germans from crossing the river; another
of his lieutenants, Quintus Titurius Sabinus, went with three legions
to Normandy, where the main body of the insurgents assembled.
But the powerful and intelligent Veneti were the true centre
of the insurrection; the chief attack by land and sea was directed
against them.  Caesar's lieutenant, Decimus Brutus, brought up
the fleet formed partly of the ships of the subject Celtic cantons,
partly of a number of Roman galleys hastily built on the Loire
and manned with rowers from the Narbonese province; Caesar himself
advanced with the flower of his infantry into the territory of the Veneti.
But these were prepared beforehand, and had with equal skill
and resolution availed themselves of the favourable circumstances
which the nature of the ground in Brittany and the possession
of a considerable naval power presented.  The country was much
intersected and poorly furnished with grain, the towns
were situated for the most part on cliffs and tongues of land,
and were accessible from the mainland only by shallows which it was
difficult to cross; the provision of supplies and the conducting
of sieges were equally difficult for the army attacking by land,
while the Celts by means of their vessels could furnish the towns
easily with everything needful, and in the event of the worst could
accomplish their evacuation.  The legions expended their time
and strength in the sieges of the Venetian townships, only to see
the substantial fruits of victory ultimately carried off in the vessels
of the enemy.

Naval Battle between the Romans and the Veneti
Submission of the Maritime Cantons

Accordingly when the Roman fleet, long detained by storms
at the mouth of the Loire, arrived at length on the coast of Brittany,
it was left to decide the struggle by a naval battle.  The Celts,
conscious of their superiority on this element, brought forth their
fleet against that of the Romans commanded by Brutus.  Not only
did it number 220 sail, far more than the Romans had been able
to bring up, but their high-decked strong sailing-vessels with flat
bottoms were also far better adapted for the high-running waves
of the Atlantic Ocean than the low, lightly-built oared galleys
of the Romans with their sharp keels.  Neither the missiles
nor the boarding-bridges of the Romans could reach the high deck
of the enemy's vessels, and the iron beaks recoiled powerless
from the strong oaken planks.  But the Roman mariners cut the ropes,
by which the yards were fastened to the masts, by means of sickles
fastened to long poles; the yards and sails fell down, and, as they
did not know how to repair the damage speedily, the ship was thus
rendered a wreck just as it is at the present day by the falling
of the masts, and the Roman boats easily succeeded by a joint attack
in mastering the maimed vessel of the enemy.  When the Gauls
perceived this manoeuvre, they attempted to move from the coast
on which they had taken up the combat with the Romans, and to gain
the high seas, whither the Roman galleys could not follow them;
but unhappily for them there suddenly set in a dead calm,
and the immense fleet, towards the equipment of which the maritime
cantons had applied all their energies, was almost wholly destroyed
by the Romans.  Thus was this naval battle--so far as historical
knowledge reaches, the earliest fought on the Atlantic Ocean--
just like the engagement at Mylae two hundred years before,(39)
notwithstanding the most unfavourable circumstances, decided in favour
of the Romans by a lucky invention suggested by necessity.
The consequence of the victory achieved by Brutus was the surrender
of the Veneti and of all Brittany.  More with a view to impress
the Celtic nation, after so manifold evidences of clemency towards
the vanquished, by an example of fearful severity now against those
whose resistance had been obstinate, than with the view of punishing
the breach of treaty and the arrest of the Roman officers, Caesar
caused the whole common council to be executed and the people
of the Venetian canton to the last man to be sold into slavery.
By this dreadful fate, as well as by their intelligence
and their patriotism, the Veneti have more than any other Celtic clan
acquired a title to the sympathy of posterity.

Sabinus meanwhile opposed to the levy of the coast-states assembled
on the Channel the same tactics by which Caesar had in the previous
year conquered the Belgic general levy on the Aisne; he stood
on the defensive till impatience and want invaded the ranks of the enemy,
and then managed by deceiving them as to the temper and strength
of his troops, and above all by means of their own impatience,
to allure them to an imprudent assault upon the Roman camp, in which
they were defeated; whereupon the militia dispersed and the country
as far as the Seine submitted.

Expeditins against the Morini and Menapii

The Morini and Menapii alone persevered in withholding their
recognition of the Roman supremacy.  To compel them to this, Caesar
appeared on their borders; but, rendered wiser by the experiences
of their countrymen, they avoided accepting battle on the borders
of their land, and retired into the forests which then stretched
almost without interruption from the Ardennes towards the German
Ocean.  The Romans attempted to make a road through the forest
with the axe, ranging the felled trees on each side as a barricade
against the enemy's attacks; but even Caesar, daring as he was,
found it advisable after some days of most laborious marching,
especially as it was verging towards winter, to order a retreat,
although but a small portion of the Morini had submitted and the powerful
Menapii had not been reached at all.  In the following year (699)
while Caesar himself was employed in Britain the greater part
of the army was sent afresh against these tribes; but this expedition
also remained in the main unsuccessful.  Nevertheless the result
of the last campaigns was the almost complete reduction of Gaul
under the dominion of the Romans.  While central Gaul had submitted
to it without resistance, during the campaign of 697 the Belgic,
and during that of the following year the maritime, cantons
had been compelled by force of arms to acknowledge the Roman rule.
The lofty hopes, with which the Celtic patriots had begun
the last campaign, had nowhere been fulfilled.  Neither Germans
nor Britons had come to their aid; and in Belgica the presence
of Labienus had sufficed to prevent the renewal of the conflicts
of the previous year.

Establishment of Communications with Italy by the Valais

While Caesar was thus forming the Roman domain in the west by force
of arms into a compact whole, he did not neglect to open up
for the newly-conquered country--which was destined in fact to fill up
the wide gap in that domain between Italy and Spain-communications both
with the Italian home and with the Spanish provinces.  The communication
between Gaul and Italy had certainly been materially facilitated
by the military road laid out by Pompeius in 677 over Mont Genevre;(40)
but since the whole of Gaul had been subdued by the Romans, there was
need of a route crossing the ridge of the Alps from the valley of the Po,
not in a westerly but in a northerly direction, and furnishing a shorter
communication between Italy and central Gaul.  The way which leads over
the Great St. Bernard into the Valais and along the lake of Geneva
had long served the merchant for this purpose; to get this road
into his power, Caesar as early as the autumn of 697 caused Octodurum
(Martigny) to be occupied by Servius Galba, and the inhabitants
of the Valais to be reduced to subjection--a result which was,
of course, merely postponed, not prevented, by the brave resistance
of these mountain-peoples.

And with Spain

To gain communication with Spain, moreover, Publius Crassus
was sent in the following year (698) to Aquitania with instructions
to compel the Iberian tribes dwelling there to acknowledge the Roman
rule.  The task was not without difficulty; the Iberians held
together more compactly than the Celts and knew better than these
how to learn from their enemies.  The tribes beyond the Pyrenees,
especially the valiant Cantabri, sent a contingent to their
threatened countrymen; with this there came experienced officers
trained under the leadership of Sertorius in the Roman fashion,
who introduced as far as possible the principles of the Roman art
of war, and especially of encampment, among the Aquitanian levy
already respectable from its numbers and its valour.
But the excellent officer who led the Romans knew how to surmount
all difficulties, and after some hardly-contested but successful
battles he induced the peoples from the Garonne to the vicinity
of the Pyrenees to submit to the new masters.

Fresh Violations of the Rhine-Boundary by the Germans
The Usipetes and Tencteri

One of the objects which Caesar had proposed to himself--
the subjugation of Gaul--had been in substance, with exceptions
scarcely worth mentioning, attained so far as it could be attained
at all by the sword.  But the other half of the work undertaken
by Caesar was still far from being satisfactorily accomplished,
and the Germans had by no means as yet been everywhere compelled
to recognize the Rhine as their limit.  Even now, in the winter
of 698-699, a fresh crossing of the boundary had taken place
on the lower course of the river, whither the Romans had not yet
penetrated.  The German tribes of the Usipetes and Tencteri
whose attempts to cross the Rhine in the territory of the Menapii
have been already mentioned,(41) had at length, eluding the vigilance
of their opponents by a feigned retreat, crossed in the vessels
belonging to the Menapii--an enormous host, which is said,
including women and children, to have amounted to 430,000 persons.
They still lay, apparently, in the region of Nimeguen and Cleves;
but it was said that, following the invitations of the Celtic
patriot party, they intended to advance into the interior of Gaul;
and the rumour was confirmed by the fact that bands of their
horsemen already roamed as far as the borders of the Treveri.
But when Caesar with his legions arrived opposite to them, the sorely-
harassed emigrants seemed not desirous of fresh conflicts,
but very ready to accept land from the Romans and to till it in peace
under their supremacy.  While negotiations as to this were going on,
a suspicion arose in the mind of the Roman general that the Germans
only sought to gain time till the bands of horsemen sent out
by them had returned.  Whether this suspicion was well founded or not,
we cannot tell; but confirmed in it by an attack, which in spite
of the de facto suspension of arms a troop of the enemy made
on his vanguard, and exasperated by the severe loss thereby sustained,
Caesar believed himself entitled to disregard every consideration
of international law.  When on the second morning the princes
and elders of the Germans appeared in the Roman camp to apologize
for the attack made without their knowledge, they were arrested,
and the multitude anticipating no assault and deprived of their leaders
were suddenly fallen upon by the Roman army.  It was rather a manhunt
than a battle; those that did not fall under the swords of the Romans
were drowned in the Rhine; almost none but the divisions detached
at the time of the attack escaped the massacre and succeeded
in recrossing the Rhine, where the Sugambri gave them an asylu
in their territory, apparently on the Lippe.  The behaviour of Caesar
towards these German immigrants met with severe and just censure
in the senate; but, however little it can be excused, the German
encroachments were emphatically checked by the terror
which it occasioned.

Caesar on the Right Bank of the Rhine

Caesar however found it advisable to take yet a further step
and to lead the legions over the Rhine.  He was not without connections
beyond the river.  the Germans at the stage of culture
which they had then reached, lacked as yet any national coherence;
in political distraction they--though from other causes--fell nothing
short of the Celts.  The Ubii (on the Sieg and Lahn), the most
civilized among the German tribes, had recently been made subject
and tributary by a powerful Suebian canton of the interior, and had
as early as 697 through their envoys entreated Caesar to free them
like the Gauls from the Suebian rule.  It was not Caesar's design
seriously to respond to this suggestion, which would have involved
him in endless enterprises; but it seemed advisable, with the view
of preventing the appearance of the Germanic arms on the south
of the Rhine, at least to show the Roman arms beyond it. The protection
which the fugitive Usipetes and Tencteri had found among the Sugambri
afforded a suitable occasion.  In the region, apparently between
Coblentz and Andernach, Caesar erected a bridge of piles over the Rhine
and led his legions across from the Treverian to the Ubian territory.
Some smaller cantons gave in their submission; but the Sugambri,
against whom the expedition was primarily directed, withdrew,
on the approach of the Roman army, with those under their protection
into the interior.  In like manner the powerful Suebian canton
which oppressed the Ubii--presumably the same which subsequently
appears under the name of the Chatti--caused the districts immediately
adjoining the Ubian territory to be evacuated and the non-combatant
portion of the people to be placed in safety, while all the men
capable of arms were directed to assemble at the centre of the canton.
The Roman general had neither occasion nor desire to accept
this challenge; his object--partly to reconnoitre, partly to produce
an impressive effect if possible upon the Germans, or at least
on the Celts and his countrymen at home, by an expedition
over the Rhine--was substantially attained; after remaining
eighteen days on the right bank of the Rhine he again arrived
in Gaul and broke down the Rhine bridge behind him (699).

Expeditions to Britain

There remained the insular Celts.  From the close connection
between them and the Celts of the continent, especially
the maritime cantons, it may readily be conceived that they had
at least sympathized with the national resistance, and that if they
did not grant armed assistance to the patriots, they gave at any rate
an honourable asylum in their sea-protected isle to every one
who was no longer safe in his native land.  This certainly involved
a danger, if not for the present, at any rate for the future; it
seemed judicious--if not to undertake the conquest of the island
itself--at any rate to conduct there also defensive operations
by offensive means, and to show the islanders by a landing
on the coast that the arm of the Romans reached even across the Channel.
The first Roman officer who entered Brittany, Publius Crassus
had already (697) crossed thence to the "tin-islands" at the south-west
point of England (Stilly islands); in the summer of 699 Caesar
himself with only two legions crossed the Channel at its narrowest
part.(42)  He found the coast covered with masses of the enemy's
troops and sailed onward with his vessels; but the British war-
chariots moved on quite as fast by land as the Roman galleys
by sea, and it was only with the utmost difficulty that the Roman
soldiers succeeded in gaining the shore in the face of the enemy,
partly by wading, partly in boats, under the protection
of the ships of war, which swept the beach with missiles thrown
from machines and by the hand.  In the first alarm the nearest villages
submitted; but the islanders soon perceived how weak the enemy was,
and how he did not venture to move far from the shore.  The natives
disappeared into the interior and returned only to threaten
the camp; and the fleet, which had been left in the open roads,
suffered very considerable damage from the first tempest
that burst upon it.  The Romans had to reckon themselves fortunate
in repelling the attacks of the barbarians till they had bestowed
the necessary repairs on the ships, and in regaining with these
the Gallic coast before the bad season of the year came on.

Caesar himself was so dissatisfied with the results of this expedition
undertaken inconsiderately and with inadequate means, that he immediately
(in the winter of 699-700) ordered a transport fleet of 800 sail
to be fitted out, and in the spring of 700 sailed a second time
for the Kentish coast, on this occasion with five legions
and 2000 cavalry.  The forces of the Britons, assembled
this time also on the shore, retired before the mighty armada
without risking a battle; Caesar immediately set out on his march
into the interior, and after some successful conflicts crossed
the river Stour; but he was obliged to halt very much against his will,
because the fleet in the open roads had been again half destroyed
by the storms of the Channel.  Before they got the ships drawn
up upon the beach and the extensive arrangements made
for their repair, precious time was lost, which the Celts wisely
turned to account.

Cassivellaunus

The brave and cautious prince Cassivellaunus, who ruled in what
is now Middlesex and the surrounding district--formerly the terror
of the Celts to the south of the Thames, but now the protector
and champion of the whole nation--had headed the defence of the land.
He soon saw that nothing at all could be done with the Celtic
infantry against the Roman, and that the mass of the general levy--
which it was difficult to feed and difficult to control--was only
a hindrance to the defence; he therefore dismissed it and retained
only the war-chariots, of which he collected 4000, and in which
the warriors, accustomed to leap down from their chariots and fight
on foot, could be employed in a twofold manner like the burgess-
cavalry of the earliest Rome.  When Caesar was once more able
to continue his march, he met with no interruption to it;
but the British war-chariots moved always in front and alongside
of the Roman army, induced the evacuation of the country
(which from the absence of towns proved no great difficulty),
prevented the sending out of detachments, and threatened
the communications.  The Thames was crossed--apparently
between Kingston and Brentford above London--by the Romans;
they moved forward, but made no real progress; the general achieved
no victory, the soldiers made no booty, and the only actual result,
the submission of the Trinobante in the modern Essex, was less
the effect of a dread of the Romans than of the deep hostility
between this canton and Cassivellaunus.  The danger increased
with every onward step, and the attack, which the princes of Kent
by the orders of Cassivellaunus made on the Roman naval camp,
although it was repulsed, was an urgent warning to turn back.
The taking by storm of a great British tree-barricade,
in which a multitude of cattle fell into the hands of the Romans,
furnished a passable conclusion to the aimless advance and a tolerable
pretext for returning.  Cassivellaunus was sagacious enough
not to drive the dangerous enemy to extremities, and promised,
as Caesar desired him, to abstain from disturbing the Trinobantes,
to pay tribute and to furnish hostages; nothing was said
of delivering up arms or leaving behind a Roman garrison,
and even those promises were, it may be presumed, so far as
they concerned the future, neither given nor received in earnest.
After receiving the hostages Caesar returned to the naval camp
and thence to Gaul.  If he, as it would certainly seem,
had hoped on this occasion to conquer Britain, the scheme
was totally thwarted partly by the wise defensive system
of Cassivellaunus, partly and chiefly by the unserviceableness
of the Italian oared fleet in the waters of the North Sea;
for it is certain that the stipulated tribute was never paid.
But the immediate object--of rousing the islanders out of their haughty
security and inducing them in their own interest no longer to allow
their island to be a rendezvous for continental emigrants--
seems certainly to have been attained; at least no complaints
are afterwards heard as to the bestowal of such protection.

The Conspiracy of the Patriots

The work of repelling the Germanic invasion and of subduing
the continental Celts was completed.  But it is often easier
to subdue a free nation than to keep a subdued one in subjection.
The rivalry for the hegemony, by which more even than by the attacks
of Rome the Celtic nation had been ruined, was in some measure set
aside by the conquest, inasmuch as the conqueror took the hegemony
to himself.  Separate interests were silent; under the common
oppression at any rate they felt themselves again as one people;
and the infinite value of that which they had with indifference
gambled away when they possessed it--freedom and nationality--
was now, when it was too late, fully appreciated by their infinite
longing.  But was it, then, too late? With indignant shame they
confessed to themselves that a nation, which numbered at least
a million of men capable of arms, a nation of ancient and well-
founded warlike renown, had allowed the yoke to be imposed upon it
by, at the most, 50,000 Romans.  The submission of the confederacy
of central Gaul without having struck even a blow; the submission
of the Belgic confederacy without having done more than merely
shown a wish to strike; the heroic fall on the other hand
of the Nervii and the Veneti, the sagacious and successful resistance
of the Morini, and of the Britons under Cassivellaunus--
all that in each case had been done or neglected, had failed
or had succeeded--spurred the minds of the patriots to new attempts,
if possible, more united and more successful.  Especially
among the Celtic nobility there prevailed an excitement, which seemed
every moment as if it must break out into a general insurrection.
Even before the second expedition to Britain in the spring of 700 Caesar
had found it necessary to go in person to the Treveri, who,
since they had compromised themselves in the Nervian conflict in 697,
had no longer appeared at the general diets and had formed more than
suspicious connections with the Germans beyond the Rhine.  At that
time Caesar had contented himself with carrying the men of most
note among the patriot party, particularly Indutiomarus, along
with him to Britain in the ranks of the Treverian cavalry-contingent;
he did his utmost to overlook the conspiracy, that he might not
by strict measures ripen it into insurrection.  But when the Haeduan
Dumnorix, who likewise was present in the army destined for Britain,
nominally as a cavalry officer, but really as a hostage,
peremptorily refused to embark and rode home instead, Caesar could
not do otherwise than have him pursued as a deserter; he was accordingly
overtaken by the division sent after him and, when he stood
on his defence, was cut down (700).  That the most esteemed knight
of the most powerful and still the least dependent of the Celtic cantons
should have been put to death by the Romans, was a thunder-clap
for the whole Celtic nobility; every one who was conscious
of similar sentiments--and they formed the great majority--
saw in that catastrophe the picture of what was in store for himself.

Insurrection

If patriotism and despair had induced the heads of the Celtic
nobility to conspire, fear and self-defence now drove the conspirators
to strike.  In the winter of 700-701, with the exception of a legion
stationed in Brittany and a second in the very unsettled canton
of the Carnutes (near Chartres), the whole Roman army numbering six
legions was encamped in the Belgic territory.  The scantiness
of the supplies of grain had induced Caesar to station his troops
farther apart than he was otherwise wont to do--in six different
camps constructed in the cantons of the Bellovaci, Ambiani, Morini,
Nervii, Remi, and Eburones.  The fixed camp placed farthest towards
the east in the territory of the Eburones, probably not far
from the later Aduatuca (the modern Tongern), the strongest of all,
consisting of a legion under one of the most respected of Caesar's
leaders of division, Quintus Titurius Sabinus, besides different
detachments led by the brave Lucius Aurunculeius Cotta(43) and amounting
together to the strength of half a legion, found itself all of a sudden
surrounded by the general levy of the Eburones under the kings Ambiorix
and Catuvolcus.  The attack came so unexpectedly, that the very men
absent from the camp could not be recalled and were cut off
by the enemy; otherwise the immediate danger was not great,
as there was no lack of provisions, and the assault, which the Eburones
attempted, recoiled powerless from the Roman intrenchments.
But king Ambiorix informed the Roman commander that all the Roman camps
in Gaul were similarly assailed on the same day, and that the Romans
would undoubtedly be lost if the several corps did not quickly set out
and effect a junction; that Sabinus had the more reason to make haste,
as the Germans too from beyond the Rhine were already advancing
against him; that he himself out of friendship for the Romans
would promise them a free retreat as far as the nearest
Roman camp, only two days' march distant.  Some things
in these statements seemed no fiction; that the little canton
of the Eburones specially favoured by the Romans(44) should have
undertaken the attack of its own accord was in reality incredible,
and, owing to the difficulty of effecting a communication with the other
far-distant camps, the danger of being attacked by the whole
mass of the insurgents and destroyed in detail was by no means
to be esteemed slight; nevertheless it could not admit of the smallest
doubt that both honour and prudence required them to reject
the capitulation offered by the enemy and to maintain the post
entrusted to them.  Yet, although in the council of war numerous
voices and especially the weighty voice of Lucius Aurunculeius
Cotta supported this view, the commandant determined to accept
the proposal of Ambiorix.  The Roman troops accordingly marched
off next morning; but when they had arrived at a narrow valley about
two miles from the camp they found themselves surrounded
by the Eburones and every outlet blocked.  They attempted to open
a way for themselves by force of arms; but the Eburones would not enter
into any close combat, and contented themselves with discharging
their missiles from their unassailable positions into the dense
mass of the Romans.  Bewildered, as if seeking deliverance
from treachery at the hands of the traitor, Sabinus requested
a conference with Ambiorix; it was granted, and he and the officers
accompanying him were first disarmed and then slain.  After the fall
of the commander the Eburones threw themselves from all sides
at once on the exhausted and despairing Romans, and broke their
ranks; most of them, including Cotta who had already been wounded,
met their death in this attack; a small portion, who had succeeded
in regaining the abandoned camp, flung themselves on their own
swords during the following night.  The whole corps was annihilated.

Cicero Attacked

This success, such as the insurgents themselves had hardly ventured
to hope for, increased the ferment among the Celtic patriots
so greatly that the Romans were no longer sure of a single district
with the exception of the Haedui and Remi, and the insurrection
broke out at the most diverse points.  First of all the Eburones
followed up their victory.  Reinforced by the levy of the Aduatuci,
who gladly embraced the opportunity of requiting the injury done
to them by Caesar, and of the powerful and still unsubdued Menapii,
they appeared in the territory of the Nervii, who immediately
joined them, and the whole host thus swelled to 60,000 moved
forward to confront the Roman camp formed in the Nervian canton.
Quintus Cicero, who commanded there, had with his weak corps
a difficult position, especially as the besiegers, learning from the foe,
constructed ramparts and trenches, -testudines- and moveable towers
after the Roman fashion, and showered fire-balls and burning
spears over the straw-covered huts of the camp.  The only hope
of the besieged rested on Caesar, who lay not so very far off
with three legions in his winter encampment in the region of Amiens.
But--a significant proof of the feeling that prevailed in Gaul-
for a considerable time not the slightest hint reached the general
either of the disaster of Sabinus or of the perilous
situation of Cicero.

Caesar Proceeds to His Relief
The Insurrection Checked

At length a Celtic horseman from Cicero's camp succeeded
in stealing through the enemy to Caesar.  On receiving the startling
news Caesar immediately set out, although only with two weak
legions, together numbering about 7000, and 400 horsemen;
nevertheless the announcement that Caesar was advancing sufficed
to induce the insurgents to raise the siege.  It was time;
not one tenth of the men in Cicero's camp remained unwounded.
Caesar, against whom the insurgent army had turned, deceived the enemy,
in the way which he had already on several occasions successfully
applied, as to his strength; under the most unfavourable
circumstances they ventured an assault upon the Roman camp
and in doing so suffered a defeat.  It is singular, but characteristic
of the Celtic nation, that in consequence of this one lost battle,
or perhaps rather in consequence of Caesar's appearance in person
on the scene of conflict, the insurrection, which had commenced
so victoriously and extended so widely, suddenly and pitiably broke
off the war.  The Nervii, Menapii, Aduatuci, Eburones, returned
to their homes.  The forces of the maritime cantons, who had made
preparations for assailing the legion in Brittany, did the same.
The Treveri, through whose leader Indutiomarus the Eburones,
the clients of the powerful neighbouring canton, had been chiefly
induced to that so successful attack, had taken arms on the news
of the disaster of Aduatuca and advanced into the territory
of the Remi with the view of attacking the legion cantoned there
under the command of Labienus; they too desisted for the present
from continuing the struggle.  Caesar not unwillingly postponed
farther measures against the revolted districts till the spring,
in order not to expose his troops which had suffered much to the whole
severity of the Gallic winter, and with the view of only reappearing
in the field when the fifteen cohorts destroyed should have
been replaced in an imposing manner by the levy of thirty new
cohorts which he had ordered.  The insurrection meanwhile pursued
its course, although there was for the moment a suspension of arms.
Its chief seats in central Gaul were, partly the districts
of the Carnutes and the neighbouring Senones (about Sens), the latter
of whom drove the king appointed by Caesar out of their country;
partly the region of the Treveri, who invited the whole Celtic
emigrants and the Germans beyond the Rhine to take part
in the impending national war, and called out their whole force,
with a view to advance in the spring a second time into the territory
of the Remi, to capture the corps of Labienus, and to seek
a communication with the insurgents on the Seine and Loire.
The deputies of these three cantons remained absent from the diet
convoked by Caesar in central Gaul, and thereby declared war just
as openly as a part of the Belgic cantons had done by the attacks
on the camps of Sabinus and Cicero.

And Suppressed

The winter was drawing to a close when Caesar set out
with his army, which meanwhile had been considerably reinforced,
against the insurgents.  The attempts of the Treveri to concentrate
the revolt had not succeeded; the agitated districts were kept in check
by the marching in of Roman troops, and those in open rebellion
were attacked in detail.  First the Nervii were routed by Caesar
in person.  The Senones and Carnutes met the same fate.  The Menapii,
the only canton which had never submitted to the Romans,
were compelled by a grand attack simultaneously directed against them
from three sides to renounce their long-preserved freedom.
Labienus meanwhile was preparing the same fate for the Treveri.
Their first attack had been paralyzed, partly by the refusal
of the adjoining German tribes to furnish them with mercenaries,
partly by the fact that Indutiomarus, the soul of the whole movement
had fallen in a skirmish with the cavalry of Labienus.  But they did
not on this account abandon their projects.  With their whole levy
they appeared in front of Labienus and waited for the German bands
that were to follow, for their recruiting agents found a better
reception than they had met with from the dwellers on the Rhine,
among the warlike tribes of the interior of Germany, especially,
as it would appear, among the Chatti.  But when Labienus seemed
as if he wished to avoid these and to march off in all haste, the Treveri
attacked the Romans even before the Germans arrived and in a most
unfavourable spot, and were completely defeated.  Nothing remained
for the Germans who came up too late but to return, nothing for
the Treverian canton but to submit; its government reverted to the head
of the Roman party Cingetorix, the son-in-law of Indutiomarus.
After these expeditions of Caesar against the Menapii and of Labienus
against the Treveri the whole Roman army was again united
in the territory of the latter.  With the view of rendering
the Germans disinclined to come back, Caesar once more crossed
the Rhine, in order if possible to strike an emphatic blow against
the troublesome neighbours; but, as the Chatti, faithful to their
tried tactics, assembled not on their western boundary,
but far in the interior, apparently at the Harz mountains,
for the defence of the land, he immediately turned back and contented
himself with leaving behind a garrison at the passage of the Rhine.

Retaliatory Expedition against the Eburones

Accounts had thus been settled with all the tribes that took part
in the rising; the Eburones alone were passed over but not forgotten.
Since Caesar had met with the disaster of Aduatuca, he had worn
mourning and had sworn that he would only lay it aside
when he should have avenged his soldiers, who had not fallen
in honourable war, but had been treacherously murdered.
Helpless and passive the Eburones sat in their huts and looked on
as the neighbouring cantons one after another submitted to the Romans,
till the Roman cavalry from the Treverian territory advanced
through the Ardennes into their land.  So little were they prepared
for the attack, that the cavalry had almost seized the king
Ambiorix in his house; with great difficulty, while his attendants
sacrificed themselves on his behalf, he escaped into the neighbouring
thicket.  Ten Roman legions soon followed the cavalry.
At the same time a summons was issued to the surrounding tribes
to hunt the outlawed Eburones and pillage their land in concert
with the Roman soldiers; not a few complied with the call, including
even an audacious band of Sugambrian horsemen from the other side
of the Rhine, who for that matter treated the Romans no better than
the Eburones, and had almost by a daring coup de main surprised
the Roman camp at Aduatuca.  The fate of the Eburones was dreadful.
However they might hide themselves in forests and morasses,
there were more hunters than game.  Many put themselves to death
like the gray-haired prince Catuvolcus; only a few saved life
and liberty, but among these few was the man whom the Romans sought
above all to seize, the prince Ambiorix; with but four horsemen
he escaped over the Rhine.  This execution against the canton
which had transgressed above all the rest was followed in the other
districts by processes of high treason against individuals.  The season
for clemency was past.  At the bidding of the Roman proconsul
the eminent Carnutic knight Acco was beheaded by Roman lictors
(701) and the rule of the -fasces- was thus formally inaugurated.
Opposition was silent; tranquillity everywhere prevailed.  Caesar
went as he was wont towards the end of the year (701) over the Alps,
that through the winter he might observe more closely
the daily-increasing complications in the capital.

Second Insurrection

The sagacious calculator had on this occasion miscalculated.
The fire was smothered, but not extinguished.  The stroke,
under which the head of Acco fell, was felt by the whole Celtic nobility.
At this very moment the position of affairs presented better prospects
than ever.  The insurrection of the last winter had evidently failed
only through Caesar himself appearing on the scene of action;
now he was at a distance, detained on the Po by the imminence
of civil war, and the Gallic army, which was collected on the upper Seine,
was far separated from its dreaded leader.  If a general insurrection
now broke out in central Gaul, the Roman army might be surrounded,
and the almost undefended old Roman province be overrun before Caesar
reappeared beyond the Alps, even if the Italian complications
did not altogether prevent him from further concerning himself about Gaul.

The Carnutes
The Arverni

Conspirators from all the cantons of central Gaul assembled;
the Carnutes, as most directly affected by the execution of Acco,
offered to take the lead.  On a set day in the winter of 701-702
the Carnutic knights Gutruatus and Conconnetodumnus gave at Cenabum
(Orleans) the signal for the rising, and put to death in a body
the Romans who happened to be there.  The most vehement agitation
seized the length and breadth of the great Celtic land; the patriots
everywhere bestirred themselves.  But nothing stirred the nation
so deeply as the insurrection of the Arverni.  The government
of this community, which had formerly under its kings been the first
in southern Gaul, and had still after the fall of its principality
occasioned by the unfortunate wars against Rome(45) continued to be
one of the wealthiest, most civilized, and most powerful in all Gaul,
had hitherto inviolably adhered to Rome.  Even now the patriot party
in the governing common council was in the minority; an attempt
to induce it to join the insurrection was in vain.  The attacks
of the patriots were therefore directed against the common council
and the existing constitution itself; and the more so, that the change
of constitution which among the Arverni had substituted the common
council for the prince(46) had taken place after the victories
of the Romans and probably under their influence.

Vercingetorix

The leader of the Arvernian patriots Vercingetorix, one of those
nobles whom we meet with among the Celts, of almost regal repute
in and beyond his canton, and a stately, brave, sagacious man
to boot, left the capital and summoned the country people,
who were as hostile to the ruling oligarchy as to the Romans, at once
to re-establish the Arvernian monarchy and to go to war with Rome.
The multitude quickly joined him; the restoration of the throne
of Luerius and Betuitus was at the same time the declaration
of a national war against Rome.  The centre of unity,
from the want of which all previous attempts of the nation
to shake off the foreign yoke had failed, was now found
in the new self-nominated king of the Arverni.  Vercingetorix
became for the Celts of the continent what Cassivellaunus
was for the insular Celts; the feeling strongly pervaded the masses
that he, if any one, was the man to save the nation.

Spread of the Insurrection
Appearance of Caesar

The west from the mouth of the Garonne to that of the Seine
was rapidly infected by the insurrection, and Vercingetorix
was recognized by all the cantons there as commander-in-chief;
where the common council made any difficulty, the multitude compelled
it to join the movement; only a few cantons, such as that
of the Bituriges, required compulsion to join it, and these perhaps
only for appearance' sake.  The insurrection found a less favourable
soil in the regions to the east of the upper Loire.  Everything
here depended on the Haedui; and these wavered.  The patriotic
party was very strong in this canton; but the old antagonism
to the leading of the Arverni counterbalanced their influence--
to the most serious detriment of the insurrection, as the accession
of the eastern cantons, particularly of the Sequani and Helvetii,
was conditional on the accession of the Haedui, and generally
in this part of Gaul the decision rested with them.  While the insurgents
were thus labouring partly to induce the cantons that still
hesitated, especially the Haedui, to join them, partly to get
possession of Narbo--one of their leaders, the daring Lucterius,
had already appeared on the Tarn within the limits of the old
province--the Roman commander-in-chief suddenly presented himself
in the depth of winter, unexpected alike by friend and foe,
on this side of the Alps.  He quickly made the necessary preparations
to cover the old province, and not only so, but sent also a corps
over the snow-covered Cevennes into the Arvernian territory;
but he could not remain here, where the accession of the Haedui
to the Gallic alliance might any moment cut him off from his army
encamped about Sens and Langres.  With all secrecy he went to Vienna,
and thence, attended by only a few horsemen, through the territory
of the Haedui to his troops.  The hopes, which had induced
the conspirators to declare themselves, vanished; peace continued
in Italy, and Caesar stood once more at the head of his army.

The Gallic Plan of War

But what were they to do? It was folly under such circumstances
to let the matter come to the decision of arms; for these had already
decidedly irrevocably.  They might as well attempt to shake
the Alps by throwing stones at them as to shake the legions by means
of the Celtic bands, whether these might be congregated in huge
masses or sacrificed in detail canton after canton.  Vercingetorix
despaired of defeating the Romans.  He adopted a system of warfare
similar to that by which Cassivellaunus had saved the insular
Celts.  The Roman infantry was not to be vanquished; but Caesar's
cavalry consisted almost exclusively of the contingent
of the Celtic nobility, and was practically dissolved by the general
revolt.  It was possible for the insurrection, which was in fact
essentially composed of the Celtic nobility, to develop such
a superiority in this arm, that it could lay waste the land far
and wide, burn down towns and villages, destroy the magazines,
and endanger the supplies and the communications of the enemy,
without his being able seriously to hinder it.  Vercingetorix
accordingly directed all his efforts to the increase of his cavalry,
and of the infantry-archers who were according to the mode of fighting
of that time regularly associated with it.  He did not send the immense
and self-obstructing masses of the militia of the line to their homes,
but he did not allow them to face the enemy, and attempted
to impart to them gradually some capacity of intrenching, marching,
and manoeuvring, and some perception that the soldier is not destined
merely for hand-to-hand combat.  Learning from the enemy, he adopted
in particular the Roman system of encampment, on which depended
the whole secret of the tactical superiority of the Romans;
for in consequence of it every Roman corps combined all the advantages
of the garrison of a fortress with all the advantages of an offensive
army.(47)  It is true that a system completely adapted to Britain
which had few towns and to its rude, resolute, and on the whole
united inhabitants was not absolutely transferable to the rich
regions on the Loire and their indolent inhabitants on the eve
of utter political dissolution.  Vercingetorix at least accomplished
this much, that they did not attempt as hitherto to hold every
town with the result of holding none; they agreed to destroy
the townships not capable of defence before attack reached them,
but to defend with all their might the strong fortresses. At the same
time the Arvernian king did what he could to bind to the cause of their
country the cowardly and backward by stern severity, the hesitating
by entreaties and representations, the covetous by gold, the decided
opponents by force, and to compel or allure the rabble high or low
to some manifestation of patriotism.

Beginning of the Struggle

Even before the winter was at an end, he threw himself on the Boii
settled by Caesar in the territory of the Haedui, with the view
of annihilating these, almost the sole trustworthy allies of Rome,
before Caesar came up.  The news of this attack induced Caesar,
leaving behind the baggage and two legions in the winter quarters
of Agedincum (Sens), to march immediately and earlier than he would
doubtless otherwise have done, against the insurgents.  He remedied
the sorely-felt want of cavalry and light infantry in some measure
by gradually bringing up German mercenaries, who instead of using
their own small and weak ponies were furnished with Italian
and Spanish horses partly bought, partly procured by requisition
of the officers.  Caesar, after having by the way caused Cenabum,
the capital of the Carnutes, which had given the signal for the revolt,
to be pillaged and laid in ashes, moved over the Loire
into the country of the Bituriges.  He thereby induced Vercingetorix
to abandon the siege of the town of the Boii, and to resort likewise
to the Bituriges.  Here the new mode of warfare was first to be
tried.  By order of Vercingetorix more than twenty townships
of the Bituriges perished in the flames on one day; the general
decreed a similar self-devastation as to the neighbour cantons,
so far as they could be reached by the Roman foraging parties.

Caesar before Arvaricum

According to his intention, Avaricum (Bourges), the rich
and strong capital of the Bituriges, was to meet the same fate;
but the majority of the war-council yielded to the suppliant entreaties
of the Biturigian authorities, and resolved rather to defend that city
with all their energy.  Thus the war was concentrated in the first
instance around Avaricum, Vercingetorix placed his infantry amidst
the morasses adjoining the town in a position so unapproachable,
that even without being covered by the cavalry they needed not
to fear the attack of the legions.  The Celtic cavalry covered
all the roads and obstructed the communication.  The town was strongly
garrisoned, and the connection between it and the army before
the walls was kept open.  Caesar's position was very awkward.
The attempt to induce the Celtic infantry to fight was unsuccessful;
it stirred not from its unassailable lines.  Bravely as his soldiers
in front of the town trenched and fought, the besieged vied
with them in ingenuity and courage, and they had almost succeeded
in setting fire to the siege apparatus of their opponents.
The task withal of supplying an army of nearly 60,000 men
with provisions in a country devastated far and wide and scoured
by far superior bodies of cavalry became daily more difficult.
The slender stores of the Boii were soon used up; the supply promised
by the Haedui failed to appear; the corn was already consumed,
and the soldier was placed exclusively on flesh-rations.
But the moment was approaching when the town, with whatever contempt
of death the garrison fought, could be held no longer.  Still it was
not impossible to withdraw the troops secretly by night and destroy
the town, before the enemy occupied it.  Vercingetorix made
arrangements for this purpose, but the cry of distress raised
at the moment of evacuation by the women and children left behind
attracted the attention of the Romans; the departure miscarried.

Avaricum Conquered
Caesar Divides His Army

On the following gloomy and rainy day the Romans scaled the walls,
and, exasperated by the obstinate defence, spared neither age
nor sex in the conquered town.  The ample stores, which the Celts had
accumulated in it, were welcome to the starved soldiers of Caesar.
With the capture of Avaricum (spring of 702), a first success
had been achieved over the insurrection, and according to former
experience Caesar might well expect that it would now dissolve,
and that it would only be requisite to deal with the cantons
individually.  After he had therefore shown himself with his
whole army in the canton of the Haedui and had by this imposing
demonstration compelled the patriot party in a ferment there
to keep quiet at least for the moment, he divided his army and sent
Labienus back to Agedincum, that in combination with the troops
left there he might at the head of four legions suppress
in the first instance the movement in the territory of the Carnutes
and Senones, who on this occasion once more took the lead;
while he himself with the six remaining legions turned to the south
and prepared to carry the war into the Arvernian mountains, the proper
territory of Vercingetorix.

Labienus before Lutetia

Labienus moved from Agedincum up the left bank of the Seine with
a view to possess himself of Lutetia (Paris), the town of the Parisii
situated on an island in the Seine, and from this well-secured
position in the heart of the insurgent country to reduce it again
to subjection.  But behind Melodunum (Melun), he found his route
barred by the whole army of the insurgents, which had here taken
up a position between unassailable morasses under the leadership
of the aged Camulogenus.  Labienus retreated a certain distance,
crossed the Seine at Melodunum, and moved up its right bank
unhindered towards Lutetia; Camulogenus caused this town to be
burnt and the bridges leading to the left bank to be broken down,
and took up a position over against Labienus, in which the latter
could neither bring him to battle nor effect a passage
under the eyes of the hostile army.

Caesar before Gergovia
Fruitless Blockade

The Roman main army in its turn advanced along the Allier down
into the canton of the Arverni.  Vercingetorix attempted to prevent
it from crossing to the left bank of the Allier, but Caesar
overreached him and after some days stood before the Arvernian
capital Gergovia.(48)  Vercingetorix, however, doubtless even while
he was confronting Caesar on the Allier, had caused sufficient
stores to be collected in Gergovia and a fixed camp provided
with strong stone ramparts to be constructed for his troops in front
of the walls of the town, which was situated on the summit of a pretty
steep hill; and, as he had a sufficient start, he arrived before
Caesar at Gergovia and awaited the attack in the fortified camp
under the wall of the fortress.  Caesar with his comparatively
weak army could neither regularly besiege the place nor even
sufficiently blockade it; he pitched his camp below the rising
ground occupied by Vercingetorix, and was compelled to preserve
an attitude as inactive as his opponent.  It was almost a victory
for the insurgents, that Caesar's career of advance from triumph
to triumph had been suddenly checked on the Seine as on the Allier.
In fact the consequences of this check for Caesar were almost
equivalent to those of a defeat.

The Haedui Waver

The Haedui, who had hitherto continued vacillating, now made
preparations in earnest to join the patriotic party; the body
of men, whom Caesar had ordered to Gergovia, had on the march been
induced by its officers to declare for the insurgents; at the same
time they had begun in the canton itself to plunder and kill
the Romans settled there.  Caesar, who had gone with two-thirds
of the blockading army to meet that corps of the Haedui which was being
brought up to Gergovia, had by his sudden appearance recalled it
to nominal obedience; but it was more than ever a hollow and fragile
relation, the continuance of which had been almost too dearly
purchased by the great peril of the two legions left behind
in front of Gergovia.  For Vercingetorix, rapidly and resolutely
availing himself of Caesar's departure, had during his absence
made an attack on them, which had wellnigh ended in their
being overpowered, and the Roman camp being taken by storm.
Caesar's unrivalled celerity alone averted a second catastrophe
like that of Aduatuca.  Though the Haedui made once more fair
promises, it might be foreseen that, if the blockade should still
be prolonged without result, they would openly range themselves
on the side of the insurgents and would thereby compel Caesar to raise
it; for their accession would interrupt the communication between
him and Labienus, and expose the latter especially in his isolation
to the greatest peril.  Caesar was resolved not to let matters come
to this pass, but, however painful and even dangerous it was
to retire from Gergovia without having accomplished his object,
nevertheless, if it must be done, rather to set out immediately
and by marching into the canton of the Haedui to prevent
at any cost their formal desertion.

Caesar Defeated before Gergovia

Before entering however on this retreat, which was far
from agreeable to his quick and confident temperament, he made
yet a last attempt to free himself from his painful perplexity
by a brilliant success.  While the bulk of the garrison of Gergovia
was occupied in intrenching the side on which the assault
was expected, the Roman general watched his opportunity to surprise
another access less conveniently situated but at the moment
left bare.  In reality the Roman storming columns scaled the camp-wall,
and occupied the nearest quarters of the camp; but the whole garrison
was already alarmed, and owing to the small distances Caesar found
it not advisable to risk the second assault on the city-wall.
He gave the signal for retreat; but the foremost legions, carried
away by the impetuosity of victory, heard not or did not wish to hear,
and pushed forward without halting, up to the city-wall, some even
into the city.  But masses more and more dense threw themselves
in front of the intruders; the foremost fell, the columns stopped;
in vain centurions and legionaries fought with the most devoted
and heroic courage; the assailants were chased with very considerable
loss out of the town and down the hill, where the troops stationed
by Caesar in the plain received them and prevented greater
mischief.  The expected capture of Gergovia had been converted
into a defeat, and the considerable loss in killed and wounded--
there were counted 700 soldiers that had fallen, including 46
centurions--was the least part of the misfortune suffered.

Renewed Insurrection
Rising of the Haedui
Rising of the Belgae

The imposing position of Caesar in Gaul depended essentially
on the halo of victory that surrounded him; and this began to grow pale.
The conflicts around Avaricum, Caesar's vain attempts to compel
the enemy to fight, the resolute defence of the city and its almost
accidental capture by storm bore a stamp different from that
of the earlier Celtic wars, and had strengthened rather than impaired
the confidence of the Celts in themselves and their leader.
Moreover, the new system of warfare--the making head against the enemy
in intrenched camps under the protection of fortresses--had completely
approved itself at Lutetia as well as at Gergovia.  Lastly,
this defeat, the first which Caesar in person had suffered
from the Celts crowned their success, and it accordingly gave
as it were the signal for a second outbreak of the insurrection.
The Haedui now broke formally with Caesar and entered into union
with Vercingetorix.  Their contingent, which was still with Caesar's
army, not only deserted from it, but also took occasion to carry
off the depots of the army of Caesar at Noviodunum on the Loire,
whereby the chests and magazines, a number of remount-horses,
and all the hostages furnished to Caesar, fell into the hands
of the insurgents.  It was of at least equal importance,
that on this news the Belgae, who had hitherto kept aloof
from the whole movement, began to bestir themselves.  The powerful
canton of the Bellovaci rose with the view of attacking
in the rear the corps of Labienus, while it confronted
at Lutetia the levy of the surrounding cantons of central Gaul.
Everywhere else too men were taking to arms; the strength
of patriotic enthusiasm carried along with it even the most
decided and most favoured partisans of Rome, such as Commius
king of the Atrebates, who on account of his faithful services had
received from the Romans important privileges for his community
and the hegemony over the Morini.  The threads of the insurrection
ramified even into the old Roman province: they cherished the hope,
perhaps not without ground, of inducing the Allobroges themselves
to take arms against the Romans.  With the single exception
of the Remi and of the districts--dependent immediately on the Remi--
of the Suessiones, Leuci, and Lingones, whose peculiar isolation
was not affected even amidst this general enthusiasm, the whole Celtic
nation from the Pyrenees to the Rhine was now in reality,
for the first and for the last time, in arms for its freedom
and nationality; whereas, singularly enough, the whole German
communities, who in the former struggles had held the foremost
rank, kept aloof.  In fact, the Treveri, and as it would seem
the Menapii also, were prevented by their feuds with the Germans
from taking an active part in the national war.

Caesar's Plan of War
Caesar Unites with Labienus

It was a grave and decisive moment, when after the retreat
from Gergovia and the loss of Noviodunum a council of war was held
in Caesar's headquarters regarding the measures now to be adopted.
Various voices expressed themselves in favour of a retreat over
the Cevennes into the old Roman province, which now lay open
on all sides to the insurrection and certainly was in urgent need
of the legions that had been sent from Rome primarily for its
protection.  But Caesar rejected this timid strategy suggested
not by the position of affairs, but by government-instructions
and fear of responsibility.  He contented himself with calling
the general levy of the Romans settled in the province to arms,
and having the frontiers guarded by that levy to the best of its
ability.  On the other hand he himself set out in the opposite
direction and advanced by forced marches to Agedincum, to which
he ordered Labienus to retreat in all haste.  The Celts naturally
endeavoured to prevent the junction of the two Roman armies.
Labienus might by crossing the Marne and marching down the right bank
of the Seine have reached Agedincum, where he had left his reserve
and his baggage; but he preferred not to allow the Celts
again to behold the retreat of Roman troops.  He therefore
instead of crossing the Marne crossed the Seine under the eyes
of the deluded enemy, and on its left bank fought a battle
with the hostile forces, in which he conquered, and among many others
the Celtic general himself, the old Camulogenus, was left on the field.
Nor were the insurgents more successful in detaining Caesar
on the Loire; Caesar gave them no time to assemble larger masses there,
and without difficulty dispersed the militia of the Haedui,
which alone he found at that point

Position of the Insurgents at Alesia

Thus the junction of the two divisions of the army was happily
accomplished.  The insurgents meanwhile had consulted as to the farthe
conduct of the war at Bibracte (Autun) the capital of the Haeduil
the soul of these consultations was again Vercingetorix,
to whom the nation was enthusiastically attached after the victory
of Gergovia.  Particular interests were not, it is true,
even now silent; the Haedui still in this death-struggle of the nation
asserted their claims to the hegemony, and made a proposal
in the national assembly to substitute a leader of their own
for Vercingetorix.  But the national representatives had not merely
declined this and confirmed Vercingetorix in the supreme command,
but had also adopted his plan of war without alteration.  It was
substantially the same as that on which he had operated at Avaricum
and at Gergovia.  As the base of the new position there was
selected the strong city of the Mandubii, Alesia (Alise Sainte
Reine near Semur in the department Cote d'Or)(49) and another
entrenched camp was constructed under its walls.  Immense stores
were here accumulated, and the army was ordered thither
from Gergovia, having its cavalry raised by resolution of the national
assembly to 15,000 horse.  Caesar with the whole strength
of his army after it was reunited at Agedincum took the direction
of Besancon, with the view of now approaching the alarmed province
and protecting it from an invasion, for in fact bands of insurgents
had already shown themselves in the territory of the Helvii
on the south slope of the Cevennes.  Alesia lay almost on his way;
the cavalry of the Celts, the only arm with which Vercingetorix
chose to operate, attacked him on the route, but to the surprise
of all was worsted by the new German squadrons of Caesar
and the Roman infantry drawn up in support of them.

Caesar in Front of Alesia
Siege of Alesia

Vercingetorix hastened the more to shut himself up in Alesia;
and if Caesar was not disposed altogether to renounce the offensive,
no course was left to him but for the third time in this campaign
to proceed by way of attack with a far weaker force against an army
encamped under a well-garrisoned and well-provisioned fortress
and supplied with immense masses of cavalry.  But, while the Celts
had hitherto been opposed by only a part of the Roman legions,
the whole forces of Caesar were united in the lines round Alesia,
and Vercingetorix did not succeed, as he had succeeded at Avaricum
and Gergovia, in placing his infantry under the protection of the walls
of the fortress and keeping his external communications open
for his own benefit by his cavalry, while he interrupted those
of the enemy.  The Celtic cavalry, already discouraged by that defeat
inflicted on them by their lightly esteemed opponents, was beaten
by Caesar's German horse in every encounter.  The line
of circumvallation of the besiegers extending about nine miles
invested the whole town, including the camp attached to it.
Vercingetorix had been prepared for a struggle under the walls,
but not for being besieged in Alesia; in that point of view
the accumulated stores, considerable as they were, were yet
far from sufficient for his army--which was said to amount to 80,000
infantry and 15,000 cavalry--and for the numerous inhabitants
of the town.  Vercingetorix could not but perceive that his plan
of warfare had on this occasion turned to his own destruction,
and that he was lost unless the whole nation hastened up to the rescue
of its blockaded general.  The existing provisions were still,
when the Roman circumvallation was closed, sufficient for a month
and perhaps something more; at the last moment, when there was still
free passage at least for horsemen, Vercingetorix dismissed
his whole cavalry, and sent at the same time to the heads
of the nation instructions to call out all their forces and lead them
to the relief of Alesia.  He himself, resolved to bear in person
the responsibility for the plan of war which he had projected
and which had miscarried, remained in the fortress, to share in good
or evil the fate of his followers.  But Caesar made up his mind
at once to besiege and to be besieged.  He prepared his line
of circumvallation for defence also on its outer side, and furnished
himself with provisions for a longer period.  The days passed;
they had no longer a boll of grain in the fortress, and they
were obliged to drive out the unhappy inhabitants of the town
to perish miserably between the entrenchments of the Celts
and of the Romans, pitilessly rejected by both.

Attempt at Relief
Conflicts before Alesia

At the last hour there appeared behind Caesar's lines
the interminable array of the Celto-Belgic relieving array, said
to amount to 250,000 infantry and 8000 cavalry, from the Channel
to the Cevennes the insurgent cantons had strained every nerve
to rescue the flower of their patriots and the general of their
choice--the Bellovaci alone had answered that they were doubtless
disposed to fight against the Romans, but not beyond their own bounds.
The first assault, which the besieged of Alesia and the relieving
troops without made on the Roman double line, was repulsed;
but, when after a day's rest it was repeated, the Celts
succeeded--at a spot where the line of circumvallation ran over
the slope of a hill and could be assailed from the height above--
in filling up the trenches and hurling the defenders down
from the rampart.  Then Labienus, sent thither by Caesar, collected
the nearest cohorts and threw himself with four legions on the foe.
Under the eyes of the general, who himself appeared at the most
dangerous moment, the assailants were driven back in a desperate
hand-to-hand conflict, and the squadrons of cavalry that came
with Caesar taking the fugitives in rear completed the defeat.

Alesia Capitulates

It was more than a great victory; the fate of Alesia, and indeed
of the Celtic nation, was thereby irrevocably decided.  The Celtic
army, utterly disheartened, dispersed at once from the battle-field
and went home.  Vercingetorix might perhaps have even now taken
to flight, or at least have saved himself by the last means open
to a free man; he did not do so, but declared in a council of war that,
since he had not succeeded in breaking off the alien yoke,
he was ready to give himself up as a victim and to avert as far as
possible destruction from the nation by bringing it on his own
head.  This was done.  The Celtic officers delivered their general--
the solemn choice of the whole nation--over to the energy of their
country for such punishment as might be thought fit.  Mounted
on his steed and in full armour the king of the Arverni appeared
before the Roman proconsul and rode round his tribunal;
then he surrendered his horse and arms, and sat down in silence
on the steps at Caesar's feet (702).

Vercingetorix Executed

Five years afterwards he was led in triumph through the streets
of the Italian capital, and, while his conqueror was offering solemn
thanks to the gods on the summit of the Capitol, Vercingetorix
was beheaded at its foot as guilty of high treason against the Roman
nation.  As after a day of gloom the sun may perhaps break through
the clouds at its setting, so destiny may bestow on nations
in their decline yet a last great man.  Thus Hannibal stands
at the close of the Phoenician history, and Vercingetorix
at the close of the Celtic.  They were not able to save the nations
to which they belonged from a foreign yoke, but they spared them
the last remaining disgrace--an inglorious fall.  Vercingetorix,
just like the Carthaginian, was obliged to contend not merely
against the public foe, but also and above all against that anti-national
opposition of wounded egotists and startled cowards, which regularly
accompanies a degenerate civilization; for him too a place
in history is secured, not by his battles and sieges,
but by the fact that he was able to furnish in his own person
a centre and rallying-point to a nation distracted and ruined
by the rivalry of individual interests.  And yet there can hardly
be a more marked contrast than between the sober townsman
of the Phoenician mercantile city, whose plans were directed towards
one great object with unchanging energy throughout fifty years,
and the bold prince of the Celtic land, whose mighty deeds and high-
minded self-sacrifice fall within the compass of one brief summer.
The whole ancient world presents no more genuine knight, whether
as regards his essential character or his outward appearance.
But man ought not to be a mere knight, and least of all the statesman.
It was the knight, not the hero, who disdained to escape from Alesia,
when for the nation more depended on him than on a hundred thousand
ordinary brave men.  It was the knight, not the hero, who gave
himself up as a sacrifice, when the only thing gained
by that sacrifice was that the nation publicly dishonoured itself
and with equal cowardice and absurdity employed its last breath
in proclaiming that its great historical death-struggle was a crime
against its oppressor.  How very different was the conduct
of Hannibal in similar positions! It is impossible to part
from the noble king of the Arverni without a feeling of historical
and human sympathy; but it is a significant trait of the Celtic nation,
that its greatest man was after all merely a knight.

The Last Conflicts
With the Bituriges and Carnutes

The fall of Alesia and the capitulation of the army enclosed
in it were fearful blows for the Celtic insurrection; but blows
quite as heavy had befallen the nation and yet the conflict
had been renewed.  The loss of Vercingetorix, however, was irreparable.
With him unity had come to the nation; with him it seemed also
to have departed.  We do not find that the insurgents made any attempt
to continue their joint defence and to appoint another generalissimo;
the league of patriots fell to pieces of itself, and every clan
was left to fight or come to terms with the Romans as it pleased.
Naturally the desire after rest everywhere prevailed.
Caesar too had an interest in bringing the war quickly to an end.
Of the ten years of his governorship seven had elapsed, and the last
was called in question by his political opponents in the capital;
he could only reckon with some degree of certainty on two more summers,
and, while his interest as well as his honour required
that he should hand over the newly-acquired regions to his successor
in a condition of tolerable peace and tranquillity, there was
in truth but scanty time to bring about such a state of things.
To exercise mercy was in this case still more a necessity
for the victor than for the vanquished; and he might thank his stars
that the internal dissensions and the easy temperament of the Celts
met him in this respect half way.  Where--as in the two most eminent
cantons of central Gaul, those of the Haedui and Arverni--there
existed a strong party well disposed to Rome, the cantons obtained
immediately after the fall of Alesia a complete restoration
of their former relations with Rome, and even their captives, 20,000
in number, were released without ransom, while those of the other
clans passed into the hard bondage of the victorious legionaries.
The greater portion of the Gallic districts submitted like the Haedui
and Arverni to their fate, and allowed their inevitable
punishment to be inflicted without farther resistance.
But not a few clung in foolish frivolity or sullen despair
to the lost cause, till the Roman troops of execution appeared
within their borders.  Such expeditions were in the winter of 702-703
undertaken against the Bituriges and the Carnutes.

With the Bellovaci

More serious resistance was offered by the Bellovaci,
who in the previous year had kept aloof from the relief of Alesia;
they seem to have wished to show that their absence on that decisive day
at least did not proceed from want of courage or of love for freedom.
The Atrebates, Ambiani, Caletes, and other Belgic cantons took part
in this struggle; the brave king of the Atrebates Commius,
whose accession to the insurrection the Romans had least of all forgiven,
and against whom recently Labienus had even directed an atrocious
attempt at assassination, brought to the Bellovaci 500 German
horse, whose value the campaign of the previous year had shown.
The resolute and talented Bellovacian Correus, to whom the chief
conduct of the war had fallen, waged warfare as Vercingetorix
had waged it, and with no small success.  Although Caesar had gradually
brought up the greater part of his army, he could neither bring
the infantry of the Bellovaci to a battle, nor even prevent it
from taking up other positions which afforded better protection
against his augmented forces; while the Roman horse, especially
the Celtic contingents, suffered most severe losses in various combats
at the hands of the enemy's cavalry, especially of the German cavalry
of Commius.  But after Correus had met his death in a skirmish
with the Roman foragers, the resistance here too was broken;
the victor proposed tolerable conditions, to which the Bellovaci
along with their confederates submitted.  The Treveri were reduced
to obedience by Labienus, and incidentally the territory
of the outlawed Eburones was once more traversed and laid waste.
Thus the last resistance of the Belgic confederacy was broken.

On the Loire

The maritime cantons still made an attempt to defend themselves
against the Roman domination in concert with their neighbours
on the Loire.  Insurgent bands from the Andian, Carnutic, and other
surrounding cantons assembled on the lower Loire and besieged
in Lemonum (Poitiers) the prince of the Pictones who was friendly
to the Romans.  But here too a considerable Roman force soon appeared
against them; the insurgents abandoned the siege, and retreated
with the view of placing the Loire between themselves and the enemy,
but were overtaken on the march and defeated; whereupon
the Carnutes and the other revolted cantons, including even
the maritime ones, sent in their submission.

And in Uxellodunum

The resistance was at an end; save that an isolated leader of free
bands still here and there upheld the national banner.  The bold
Drappes and the brave comrade in arms of Vercingetorix Lucterius,
after the breaking up of the army united on the Loire, gathered
together the most resolute men, and with these threw themselves
into the strong mountain-town of Uxellodunum on the Lot,(50)
which amidst severe and fatal conflicts they succeeded in sufficiently
provisioning.  In spite of the loss of their leaders, of whom
Drappes had been taken prisoner, and Lucterius had been cut off
from the town, the garrison resisted to the uttermost; it was not
till Caesar appeared in person, and under his orders the spring
from which the besieged derived their water was diverted by means
of subterranean drains, that the fortress, the last stronghold
of the Celtic nation, fell.  To distinguish the last champions
of the cause of freedom, Caesar ordered that the whole garrison should
have their hands cut off and should then be dismissed, each one
to his home.  Caesar, who felt it all-important to put an end at least
to open resistance throughout Gaul, allowed king Commius, who still
held out in the region of Arras and maintained desultory warfare
with the Roman troops there down to the winter of 703-704, to make
his peace, and even acquiesced when the irritated and justly
distrustful man haughtily refused to appear in person in the Roman
camp.  It is very probable that Caesar in a similar way allowed
himself to be satisfied with a merely nominal submission, perhaps
even with a de facto armistice, in the less accessible districts
of the north-west and north-east of Gaul.(51)

Gaul Subdued

Thus was Gaul--or, in other words, the land west of the Rhine
and north of the Pyrenees--rendered subject after only eight years
of conflict (696-703) to the Romans.  Hardly a year after the full
pacification of the land, at the beginning of 705, the Roman troops
had to be withdrawn over the Alps in consequence of the civil war,
which had now at length broken out in Italy, and there remained
nothing but at the most some weak divisions of recruits in Gaul.
Nevertheless the Celts did not again rise against the foreign yoke;
and, while in all the old provinces of the empire there was
fighting against Caesar, the newly-acquired country alone remained
continuously obedient to its conqueror.  Even the Germans
did not during those decisive years repeat their attempts to conquer
new settlements on the left bank of the Rhine.  As little did
there occur in Gaul any national insurrection or German invasion
during the crises that followed, although these offered the most
favourable opportunities.  If disturbances broke out anywhere,
such as the rising of the Bellovaci against the Romans in 708,
these movements were so isolated and so unconnected with
the complications in Italy, that they were suppressed without material
difficulty by the Roman governors.  Certainly this state of peace
was most probably, just as was the peace of Spain for centuries,
purchased by provisionally allowing the regions that were most
remote and most strongly pervaded by national feeling--Brittany,
the districts on the Scheldt, the region of the Pyrenees--
to withdraw themselves de facto in a more or less definite manner
from the Roman allegiance.  Nevertheless the building of Caesar--
however scanty the time which he found for it amidst other
and at the moment still more urgent labours, however unfinished
and but provisionally rounded off he may have left it--in substance
stood the test of this fiery trial, as respected both the repelling
of the Germans and the subjugation of the Celts.

Organization
Roman Taxation

As to administration in chief, the territories newly acquired
by the governor of Narbonese Gaul remained for the time being united
with the province of Narbo; it was not till Caesar gave up
this office (710) that two new governorships--Gaul proper
and Belgica--were formed out of the territory which he conquered.
That the individual cantons lost their political independence,
was implied in the very nature of conquest.  They became throughout
tributary to the Roman community.  Their system of tribute however was,
of course, not that by means of which the nobles and financial
aristocracy turned Asia to profitable account; but, as was
the case in Spain, a tribute fixed once for all was imposed on each
individual community, and the levying of it was left to itself.
In this way forty million sesterces (400,000 pounds) flowed annually
from Gaul into the chests of the Roman government; which, no doubt,
undertook in return the cost of defending the frontier of the
Rhine.  Moreover, the masses of gold accumulated in the temples
of the gods and the treasuries of the grandees found their way,
as a matter of course, to Rome; when Caesar offered his Gallic gold
throughout the Roman empire and brought such masses of it at once
into the money market that gold as compared with silver fell about
25 per cent, we may guess what sums Gaul lost through the war.

Indulgences towards Existing Arrangements

The former cantonal constitutions with their hereditary kings,
or their presiding feudal-oligarchies, continued in the main
to subsist after the conquest, and even the system of clientship,
which made certain cantons dependent on others more powerful,
was not abolished, although no doubt with the loss of political
independence its edge was taken off.  The sole object of Caesar
was, while making use of the existing dynastic, feudalist,
and hegemonic divisions, to arrange matters in the interest of Rome,
and to bring everywhere into power the men favourably disposed
to the foreign rule.  Caesar spared no pains to form a Roman party
in Gaul; extensive rewards in money and specially in confiscated
estates were bestowed on his adherents, and places in the common
council and the first offices of state in their cantons
were procured for them by Caesar's influence.  Those cantons
in which a sufficiently strong and trustworthy Roman party existed,
such as those of the Remi, the Lingones, the Haedui, were favoured
by the bestowal of a freer communal constitution--the right
of alliance, as it was called--and by preferences in the regulation
of the matter of hegemony.  The national worship and its priests
seem to have been spared by Caesar from the outset as far as possible;
no trace is found in his case of measures such as were adopted
in later times by the Roman rulers against the Druidical system,
and with this is probably connected the fact that his Gallic wars,
so far as we see, do not at all bear the character of religious
warfare after the fashion which formed so prominent a feature
of the Britannic wars subsequently.

Introduction of the Romanizing of the Country

While Caesar thus showed to the conquered nation every allowable
consideration and spared their national, political, and religious
institutions as far as was at all compatible with their subjection
to Rome, he did so, not as renouncing the fundamental idea of his
conquest, the Romanization of Gaul, but with a view to realize it
in the most indulgent way.  He did not content himself with letting
the same circumstances, which had already in great part Romanized
the south province, produce their effect likewise in the north;
but, like a genuine statesman, he sought to stimulate the natural
course of development and, moreover, to shorten as far as possible
the always painful period of transition.  To say nothing
of the admission of a number of Celts of rank into Roman citizenship
and even of several perhaps into the Roman senate, it was probably
Caesar who introduced, although with certain restrictions,
the Latin instead of the native tongue as the official language
within the several cantons in Gaul, and who introduced the Roman
instead of the national monetary system on the footing of reserving
the coinage of gold and of denarii to the Roman authorities, while
the smaller money was to be coined by the several cantons, but only
for circulation within the cantonal bounds, and this too in accordance
with the Roman standard.  We may smile at the Latin jargon,
which the dwellers by the Loire and the Seine henceforth employed
in accordance with orders;(52) but these barbarisms were pregnant
with a greater future than the correct Latin of the capital.
Perhaps too, if the cantonal constitution in Gaul afterwards appears
more closely approximated to the Italian urban constitution,
and the chief places of the canton as well as the common councils
attain a more marked prominence in it than was probably the case
in the original Celtic organization, the change may be referred
to Caesar.  No one probably felt more than the political heir
of Gaius Gracchus and of Marius, how desirable in a military
as well as in a political point of view it would have been to establish
a series of Transalpine colonies as bases of support for the new rule
and starting-points of the new civilization.  If nevertheless
he confined himself to the settlement of his Celtic or German horsemen
in Noviodunum(53) and to that of the Boii in the canton
of the Haedui (54)--which latter settlement already rendered quite
the services of a Roman colony in the war with Vercingetorix(55)--
the reason was merely that his farther plans did not permit him
to put the plough instead of the sword into the hands of his legions.
What he did in later years for the old Roman province
in this respect, will be explained in its own place; it is probable
that the want of time alone prevented him from extending
the same system to the regions which he had recently subdued.

The Catastrophe of the Celtic Nation
Traits Common to the Celts and Irish

All was over with the Celtic nation.  Its political dissolution
had been completed by Caesar; its national dissolution was begun
and in course of regular progress.  This was no accidental destruction,
such as destiny sometimes prepares even for peoples capable
of development, but a self-incurred and in some measure historically
necessary catastrophe.  The very course of the last war proves this,
whether we view it as a whole or in detail.  When the establishment
of the foreign rule was in contemplation, only single districts--
mostly, moreover, German or half-German--offered energetic
resistance.  When the foreign rule was actually established,
the attempts to shake it off were either undertaken altogether
without judgment, or they were to an undue extent the work
of certain prominent nobles, and were therefore immediately
and entirely brought to an end with the death or capture of an
Indutiomarus, Camulogenus, Vercingetorix, or Correus.  The sieges
and guerilla warfare, in which elsewhere the whole moral depth
of national struggles displays itself, were throughout this Celtic
struggle of a peculiarly pitiable character.  Every page of Celtic
history confirms the severe saying of one of the few Romans who had
the judgment not to despise the so-called barbarians--that the Celts
boldly challenge danger while future, but lose their courage
before its presence.  In the mighty vortex of the world's history,
which inexorably crushes all peoples that are not as hard
and as flexible as steel, such a nation could not permanently maintain
itself; with reason the Celts of the continent suffered the same
fate at the hands of the Romans, as their kinsmen in Ireland suffer
down to our own day at the hands of the Saxons--the fate
of becoming merged as a leaven of future development in a politically
superior nationality.  On the eve of parting from this remarkable
nation we may be allowed to call attention to the fact,
that in the accounts of the ancients as to the Celts on the Loire
and Seine we find almost every one of the characteristic traits
which we are accustomed to recognize as marking the Irish.
Every feature reappears: the laziness in the culture of the fields;
the delight in tippling and brawling; the ostentation--we may recall
that sword of Caesar hung up in the sacred grove of the Arverni
after the victory of Gergovia, which its alleged former owner viewed
with a smile at the consecrated spot and ordered the sacred property
to be carefully spared; the language full of comparisons and hyperboles,
of allusions and quaint turns; the droll humour--an excellent
example of which was the rule, that if any one interrupted a person
speaking in public, a substantial and very visible hole should be
cut, as a measure of police, in the coat of the disturber
of the peace; the hearty delight in singing and reciting the deeds
of past ages, and the most decided gifts of rhetoric and poetry;
the curiosity--no trader was allowed to pass, before he had told
in the open street what he knew, or did not know, in the shape of news--
and the extravagant credulity which acted on such accounts,
for which reason in the better regulated cantons travellers
were prohibited on pain of severe punishment from communicating
unauthenticated reports to others than the public magistrates;
the childlike piety, which sees in the priest a father and asks
for his counsel in all things; the unsurpassed fervour of national
feeling, and the closeness with which those who are fellow-countrymen
cling together almost like one family in opposition to strangers;
the inclination to rise in revolt under the first chance-leader
that presents himself and to form bands, but at the same time
the utter incapacity to preserve a self-reliant courage equally remote
from presumption and from pusillanimity, to perceive the right time
for waiting and for striking a blow, to attain or even barely
to tolerate any organization, any sort of fixed military or political
discipline.  It is, and remains, at all times and all places
the same indolent and poetical, irresolute and fervid, inquisitive,
credulous, amiable, clever, but--in a political point of view--
thoroughly useless nation; and therefore its fate has been always
and everywhere the same.

The Beginnings of Romanic Development

But the fact that this great people was ruined by the Transalpine wars
of Caesar, was not the most important result of that grand enterprise;
far more momentous than the negative was the positive result.
It hardly admits of a doubt that, if the rule of the senate
had prolonged its semblance of life for some generations
longer, the migration of peoples, as it is called, would have
occurred four hundred years sooner than it did, and would have
occurred at a time when the Italian civilization had not become
naturalized either in Gaul, or on the Danube, or in Africa and
Spain.  Inasmuch as the great general and statesman of Rome
with sure glance perceived in the German tribes the rival antagonists
of the Romano-Greek world; inasmuch as with firm hand he established
the new system of aggressive defence down even to its details,
and taught men to protect the frontiers of the empire by rivers
or artificial ramparts, to colonize the nearest barbarian tribes along
the frontier with the view of warding off the more remote,
and to recruit the Roman army by enlistment from the enemy's country;
he gained for the Hellenico-Italian culture the interval necessary
to civilize the west just as it had already civilized the east.
Ordinary men see the fruits of their action; the seed sown by men
of genius germinates slowly.  Centuries elapsed before men understood
that Alexander had not merely erected an ephemeral kingdom
in the east, but had carried Hellenism to Asia; centuries again
elapsed before men understood that Caesar had not merely conquered
a new province for the Romans, but had laid the foundation
for the Romanizing of the regions of the west.  It was only a late
posterity that perceived the meaning of those expeditions
to England and Germany, so inconsiderate in a military point of view,
and so barren of immediate result.  An immense circle of peoples,
whose existence and condition hitherto were known barely through
the reports--mingling some truth with much fiction--of the mariner
and the trader, was disclosed by this means to the Greek and Roman
world.  "Daily," it is said in a Roman writing of May 698,
"the letters and messages from Gaul are announcing names of peoples,
cantons, and regions hitherto unknown to us."  This enlargement
of the historical horizon by the expeditions of Caesar beyond
the Alps was as significant an event in the world's history
as the exploring of America by European bands.  To the narrow circle
of the Mediterranean states were added the peoples of central
and northern Europe, the dwellers on the Baltic and North seas;
to the old world was added a new one, which thenceforth was influenced
by the old and influenced it in turn.  What the Gothic Theodoric
afterwards succeeded in, came very near to being already carried
out by Ariovistus.  Had it so happened, our civilization would have
hardly stood in any more intimate relation to the Romano-Greek than
to the Indian and Assyrian culture.  That there is a bridge connecting
the past glory of Hellas and Rome with the prouder fabric of modern
history; that Western Europe is Romanic, and Germanic Europe
classic; that the names of Themistocles and Scipio have to us
a very different sound from those of Asoka and Salmanassar;
that Homer and Sophocles are not merely like the Vedas and Kalidasa
attractive to the literary botanist, but bloom for us in our own
garden--all this is the work of Caesar; and, while the creation
of his great predecessor in the east has been almost wholly reduced
to ruin by the tempests of the Middle Ages, the structure of Caesar
has outlasted those thousands of years which have changed religion
and polity for the human race and even shifted for it the centre
of civilization itself, and it stands erect for what we may
designate as eternity.

The Countries on the Danube

To complete the sketch of the relations of Rome to the peoples
of the north at this period, it remains that we cast a glance
at the countries which stretch to the north of the Italian and Greek
peninsulas, from the sources of the Rhine to the Black Sea.
It is true that the torch of history does not illumine the mighty stir
and turmoil of peoples which probably prevailed at that time there,
and the solitary gleams of light that fall on this region are,
like a faint glimmer amidst deep darkness, more fitted to bewilder
than to enlighten.  But it is the duty of the historian to indicate
also the gaps in the record of the history of nations; he may not
deem it beneath him to mention, by the side of Caesar's magnificent
system of defence, the paltry arrangements by which the generals
of the senate professed to protect on this side
the frontier of the empire.

Alpine Peoples

North-eastern Italy was still as before(56) left exposed
to the attacks of the Alpine tribes.  The strong Roman army
encamped at Aquileia in 695, and the triumph of the governor
of Cisalpine Gaul Lucius Afranius, lead us to infer, that about
this time an expedition to the Alps took place, and it may have been
in consequence of this that we find the Romans soon afterwards
in closer connection with a king of the Noricans.  But that even
subsequently Italy was not at all secure on this side, is shown
by the sudden assault of the Alpine barbarians on the flourishing town
of Tergeste in 702, when the Transalpine insurrection had compelled
Caesar to divest upper Italy wholly of troops.

Illyria

The turbulent peoples also, who had possession of the district
along the Illyrian coast, gave their Roman masters constant
employment.  The Dalmatians, even at an earlier period the most
considerable people of this region, enlarged their power so much
by admitting their neighbours into their union, that the number
of their townships rose from twenty to eighty.  When they refused
to give up once more the town of Promona (not far from the river
Kerka), which they had wrested from the Liburnians, Caesar
after the battle of Pharsalia gave orders to march against them;
but the Romans were in the first instance worsted, and in consequence
of this Dalmatia became for some time a rendezvous of the party
hostile to Caesar, and the inhabitants in concert with the Pompeians
and with the pirates offered an energetic resistance
to the generals of Caesar both by land and by water.

Macedonia

Lastly Macedonia along with Epirus and Hellas lay in greater
desolation and decay than almost any other part of the Roman
empire.  Dyrrhachium, Thessalonica, and Byzantium had still some
trade and commerce; Athens attracted travellers and students
by its name and its philosophical school; but on the whole there lay
over the formerly populous little towns of Hellas, and her seaports
once swarming with men, the calm of the grave.  But if the Greeks
stirred not, the inhabitants of the hardly accessible Macedonian
mountains on the other hand continued after the old fashion their
predatory raids and feuds; for instance about 697-698 Agraeans
and Dolopians overran the Aetolian towns, and in 700 the Pirustae
dwelling in the valleys of the Drin overran southern Illyria.
The neighbouring peoples did likewise.  The Dardani on the northern
frontier as well as the Thracians in the east had no doubt been
humbled by the Romans in the eight years' conflicts from 676
to 683; the most powerful of the Thracian princes, Cotys, the ruler
of the old Odrysian kingdom, was thenceforth numbered among the client
kings of Rome.  Nevertheless the pacified land had still as before
to suffer invasions from the north and east.  The governor Gaius
Antonius was severely handled both by the Dardani and by the tribes
settled in the modern Dobrudscha, who, with the help of the dreaded
Bastarnae brought up from the left bank of the Danube, inflicted
on him an important defeat (692-693) at Istropolis (Istere, not far
from Kustendji).  Gaius Octavius fought with better fortune
against the Bessi and Thracians (694).  Marcus Piso again (697-698)
as general-in-chief wretchedly mismanaged matters; which was
no wonder, seeing that for money he gave friends and foes whatever
they wished.  The Thracian Dentheletae (on the Strymon) under his
governorship plundered Macedonia far and wide, and even stationed
their posts on the great Roman military road leading from Dyrrhachium
to Thessalonica; the people in Thessalonica made up their minds
to stand a siege from them, while the strong Roman army in the province
seemed to be present only as an onlooker when the inhabitants
of the mountains and neighbouring peoples levied contributions
from the peaceful subjects of Rome.

The New Dacian Kingdom

Such attacks could not indeed endanger the power of Rome, and a fresh
disgrace had long ago ceased to occasion concern.  But just about
this period a people began to acquire political consolidation
beyond the Danube in the wide Dacian steppes--a people which seemed
destined to play a different part in history from that of the Bessi
and the Dentheletae.  Among the Getae or Dacians in primeval times
there had been associated with the king of the people a holy man
called Zalmoxis, who, after having explored the ways and wonders
of the gods in distant travel in foreign lands, and having thoroughly
studied in particular the wisdom of the Egyptian priests
and of the Greek Pythagoreans, had returned to his native country
to endhis life as a pious hermit in a cavern of the "holy mountain."
He remained accessible only to the king and his servants, and gave
forth to the king and through him to the people his oracles
with reference to every important undertaking.  He was regarded
by his countrymen at first as priest of the supreme god and ultimately
as himself a god, just as it is said of Moses and Aaron that the Lord
had made Aaron the prophet and Moses the god of the prophet.
This had become a permanent institution; there was regularly associated
with the king of the Getae such a god, from whose mouth everything
which the king ordered proceeded or appeared to proceed.
This peculiar constitution, in which the theocratic idea had become
subservient to the apparently absolute power of the king, probably
gave to the kings of the Getae some such position with respect
to their subjects as the caliphs had with respect to the Arabs;
and one result of it was the marvellous religious-political reform
of the nation, which was carried out about this time by the king
of the Getae, Burebistas, and the god Dekaeneos.  The people,
which had morally and politically fallen into utter decay through
unexampled drunkenness, was as it were metamorphosed by the new
gospel of temperance and valour; with his bands under the influence,
so to speak, of puritanic discipline and enthusiasm king Burebistas
founded within a few years a mighty kingdom, which extended along
both banks of the Danube and reached southward far into Thrace,
Illyria, and Noricum.  No direct contact with the Romans had yet
taken place, and no one could tell what might come out of
this singular state, which reminds us of the early times of Islam;
but this much it needed no prophetic gift to foretell, that proconsuls
like Antonius and Piso were not called to contend with gods.




Chapter VIII

The Joint Rule of Pompeius and Caesar

Pompeius and Caesar in Juxtaposition

Among the democratic chiefs, who from the time of the consulate
of Caesar were recognized officially, so to speak, as the joint
rulers of the commonwealth, as the governing "triumvirs," Pompeius
according to public opinion occupied decidedly the first place.
It was he who was called by the Optimates the "private dictator";
it was before him that Cicero prostrated himself in vain;
against him were directed the sharpest sarcasms in the wall-placards
of Bibulus, and the most envenomed arrows of the talk in the saloons
of the opposition.  This was only to be expected.  According to
the facts before the public Pompeius was indisputably the first general
of his time; Caesar was a dexterous party-leader and party-orator,
of undeniable talents, but as notoriously of unwarlike and indeed
of effeminate temperament.  Such opinions had been long current;
it could not be expected of the rabble of quality that it should
trouble itself about the real state of things and abandon
once established platitudes because of obscure feats of heroism
on the Tagus.  Caesar evidently played in the league the mere part
of the adjutant who executed for his chief the work which Flavius,
Afranius, and other less capable instruments had attempted
and not performed.  Even his governorship seemed not to alter
this state of things.  Afranius had but recently occupied
a very similar position, without thereby acquiring any special
importance; several provinces at once had been of late years
repeatedly placed under one governor, and often far more
than four legions had been united in one hand; as matters
were again quiet beyond the Alps and prince Ariovistus
was recognized by the Romans as a friend and neighbour,
there was no prospect of conducting a war of any moment there.
It was natural to compare the position which Pompeius had obtained
by the Gabinio-Manilian law with that which Caesar had obtained
by the Vatinian; but the comparison did not turn out to Caesar's
advantage.  Pompeius ruled over nearly the whole Roman empire;
Caesar over two provinces.  Pompeius had the soldiers
and the treasures of the state almost absolutely at his disposal;
Caesar had only the sums assigned to him and an army of 24,000 men.
It was left to Pompeius himself to fix the point of time
for his retirement; Caesar's command was secured to him
for a long period no doubt, but yet only for a limited term.
Pompeius, in fine, had been entrusted with the most important
undertakings by sea and land; Caesar was sent to the north,
to watch over the capital from upper Italy and to take care
that Pompeius should rule it undisturbed.

Pompeius and the Capital
Anarchy

But when Pompeius was appointed by the coalition to be ruler
of the capital, he undertook a task far exceeding his powers.
Pompeius understood nothing further of ruling than may be summed up
in the word of command.  The waves of agitation in the capital
were swelled at once by past and by future revolutions; the problem
of ruling this city--which in every respect might be compared
to the Paris of the nineteenth century--without an armed force
was infinitely difficult, and for that stiff and stately
pattern-soldier altogether insoluble.  Very soon matters reached
such a pitch that friends and foes, both equally inconvenient to him,
could, so far as he was concerned, do what they pleased;
after Caesar's departure from Rome the coalition ruled doubtless
still the destinies of the world, but not the streets of the capital.
The senate too, to whom there still belonged a sort of nominal
government, allowed things in the capital to follow their
natural course; partly because the section of this body controlled
by the coalition lacked the instructions of the regents, partly because
the angry opposition kept aloof out of indifference or pessimism,
but chiefly because the whole aristocratic corporation began
to feel at any rate, if not to comprehend, its utter impotence.
For the moment therefore there was nowhere at Rome any power
of resistance in any sort of government, nowhere a real authority.
Men were living in an interregnum between the ruin of the aristocratic,
and the rise of the military, rule; and, if the Roman commonwealth
has presented all the different political functions and organizations
more purely and normally than any other in ancient or modern times,
it has also exhibited political disorganization-anarchy--
with an unenviable clearness.  It is a strange coincidence
that in the same years, in which Caesar was creating beyond the Alps
a workto last for ever, there was enacted in Rome one of the most
extravagant political farces that was ever produced upon the stage
of the world's history.  The new regent of the commonwealth
did not rule, but shut himself up in his house and sulked in silence.
The former half-deposed government likewise did not rule, but sighed,
sometimes in private amidst the confidential circles of the villas,
sometimes in chorus in the senate-house.  The portion of the burgesses
which had still at heart freedom and order was disgusted
with the reign of confusion, but utterly without leaders
and counsel it maintained a passive attitude-not merely avoiding
all political activity, but keeping aloof, as far as possible,
from the political Sodom itself.

The Anarchists

On the other hand the rabble of every sort never had better days,
never found a merrier arena.  The number of little great men
was legion.  Demagogism became quite a trade, which accordingly
did not lack its professional insignia--the threadbare mantle,
the shaggy beard, the long streaming hair, the deep bass voice;
and not seldom it was a trade with golden soil.  For the standing
declamations the tried gargles of the theatrical staff
were an article in much request;(1) Greeks and Jews, freedmen
and slaves, were the most regular attenders and the loudest criers
in the public assemblies; frequently, even when it came to a vote,
only a minority of those voting consisted of burgesses constitutionally
entitled to do so.  "Next time," it is said in a letter of this period,
"we may expect our lackeys to outvote the emancipation-tax."
The real powers of the day were the compact and armed bands,
the battalions of anarchy raised by adventurers of rank
out of gladiatorial slaves and blackguards.  Their possessors
had from the outset been mostly numbered among the popular party;
but since the departure of Caesar, who alone understood how to impress
the democracy, and alone knew how to manage it, all discipline
had departed from them and every partisan practised politics
at his own hand.  Even now, no doubt, these men fought with most pleasure
under the banner of freedom; but, strictly speaking, they were neither
of democratic nor of anti-democratic views; they inscribed on the--
in itself indispensable--banner, as it happened, now the name
of the people, anon that of the senate or that of a party-chief;
Clodius for instance fought or professed to fight in succession
for the ruling democracy, for the senate, and for Crassus.  The leaders
of these bands kept to their colours only so far as they inexorably
persecuted their personal enemies--as in the case of Clodius
against Cicero and Milo against Clodius--while their partisan
position served them merely as a handle in these personal feuds.
We might as well seek to set a charivari to music as to write the history
of this political witches' revel; nor is it of any moment
to enumerate all the deeds of murder, besiegings of houses,
acts of incendiarism and other scenes of violence within a great capital,
and to reckon up how often the gamut was traversed from hissing
and shouting to spitting on and trampling down opponents,
and thence to throwing stones and drawing swords.

Clodius

The principal performer in this theatre of political rascality
was that Publius Clodius, of whose services, as already mentioned,(2)
the regents availed themselves against Cato and Cicero.
Left to himself, this influential, talented, energetic and--
in his trade--really exemplary partisan pursued during his tribunate,
of the people (696) an ultra-democratic policy, gave the citizens
corn gratis, restricted the right of the censors to stigmatize
immoral burgesses, prohibited the magistrates from obstructing
the course of the comitial machinery by religious formalities,
set asidethe limitswhich had shortly before (690), for the purpose
of checking the system of bands, been imposed on the right
of association of the lower classes, and reestablished the "street-clubs"
(-collegia compitalicia-) at that time abolished, which were nothing
else than a formal organization--subdivided according to the streets,
and with an almost military arrangement--of the whole free
or slave proletariate of the capital.  If in addition the further law,
which Clodius had likewise already projected and purposed to introduce
when praetor in 702, should give to freedmen and to slaves living
in de facto possession of freedom the same political rights
with the freeborn, the author of all these brave improvements
of the constitution might declare his work complete, and as
a second Numa of freedom and equality might invite the sweet rabble
of the capital to see him celebrate high mass in honour of the arrival
of the democratic millennium in the temple of Liberty which he had
erected on the site of one of his burnings at the Palatine.
Of course these exertions in behalf of freedom did not exclude
a traffic in decrees of the burgesses; like Caesar himself, Caesar's ape
kept governorships and other posts great and small on sale
for the benefit of his fellow-citizens, and sold the sovereign rights
of the state for the benefit of subject kings and cities.

Quarrel of Pompeius with Clodius

At all these things Pompeius looked on without stirring.
If he did not perceive how seriously he thus compromised himself,
his opponent perceived it.  Clodius had the hardihood to engage
in a dispute with the regent of Rome on a question of little moment,
as to the sending back of a captive Armenian prince; and the variance
soon became a formal feud, in which the utter helplessness
of Pompeius was displayed.  The head of the state knew not how to meet
the partisan otherwise than with his own weapons, only wielded
with far less dexterity.  If he had been tricked by Clodius respecting
the Armenian prince, he offended him in turn by releasing Cicero,
who was preeminently obnoxious to Clodius, from the exile
into which Clodius had sent him; and he attained his object
so thoroughly, that he converted his opponent into an implacable foe.
If Clodius made the streets insecure with his bands, the victorious
general likewise set slaves and pugilists to work; in the frays
which ensued the general naturally was worsted by the demagogue
and defeated in the street, and Gaius Cato was kept almost constantly
under siege in his garden by Clodius and his comrades.  It is not
the least remarkable feature in this remarkable spectacle,
that the regent and the rogue amidst their quarrel vied in courting
the favour of the fallen government; Pompeius, partly to please
the senate, permitted Cicero's recall, Clodius on the other hand
declared the Julian laws null and void, and called on Marcus Bibulus
publicly to testify to their having been unconstitutionally passed.

Naturally no positive result could issue from this imbroglio
of dark passions; its most distinctive character was just
its utterly ludicrous want of object.  Even a man of Caesar's genius
had to learn by experience that democratic agitation was completely
worn out, and that even the way to the throne no longer lay
through demagogism.  It was nothing more than a historical makeshift,
if now, in the interregnum between republic and monarchy,
some whimsical fellow dressed himself out with the prophet's mantle
and staff which Caesar had himself laid aside, and the great ideals
of Gaius Gracchus came once more upon the stage distorted into a parody;
the so-called party from which this democratic agitation
proceeded was so little such in reality, that afterwards it had
not even a part falling to it in the decisive struggle.  It cannot
even be asserted that by means of this anarchical state of things
the desire after a strong government based on military power
had been vividly kindled in the minds of those who were indifferent
to politics.  Even apart from the fact that such neutral burgesses
were chiefly to be sought outside of Rome, and thus were not
directly affected by the rioting in the capital, those minds
which could be at all influenced by such motives had been already
by their former experiences, and especially by the Catilinarian
conspiracy, thoroughly converted to the principle of authority;
but those that were really alarmed were affected far more emphatically
by a dread of the gigantic crisis inseparable from an overthrow
of the constitution, than by dread of the mere continuance of the--
at bottom withal very superficial--anarchy in the capital.
The only result of it which historically deserves notice
was the painful position in which Pompeius was placed by the attacks
of the Clodians, and which had a material share in determining
his farther steps.

Pompeius in Relation to the Gallic Victories of Caesar

Little as Pompeius liked and understood taking the initiative,
he was yet on this occasion compelled by the change of his position
towards both Clodius and Caesar to depart from his previous inaction.
The irksome and disgraceful situation to which Clodius
had reduced him, could not but at length arouse even his sluggish
nature to hatred and anger.  But far more important was the change
which took place in his relation to Caesar.  While, of the two
confederate regents, Pompeius had utterly failed in the functions
which he had undertaken, Caesar had the skill to turn his official
position to an account which left all calculations and all fears
far behind.  Without much inquiry as to permission, Caesar
had doubled his army by levies in his southern province inhabited
in great measure by Roman burgesses; had with this army crossed
the Alps instead of keeping watch over Rome from Northern Italy;
had crushed in the bud a new Cimbrian invasion, and within two years
(696, 697) had carried the Roman arms to the Rhine and the Channel.
In presence of such facts even the aristocratic tactics of ignoring
and disparaging were baffled.  He who had often been scoffed
at as effeminate was now the idol of the army, the celebrated victory-
crowned hero, whose fresh laurels outshone the faded laurels
of Pompeius, and to whom even the senate as early as 697 accorded
the demonstrations of honour usual after successful campaigns
in richer measure than had ever fallen to the share of Pompeius.
Pompeius stood towards his former adjutant precisely
as after the Gabinio-Manilian laws the latter had stood towards him.
Caesar was now the hero of the day and the master of the most powerful
Roman army; Pompeius was an ex-general who had once been famous.
It is true that no collision had yet occurred between father-in-law
and son-in-law, and the relation was externally undisturbed;
but every political alliance is inwardly broken up, when the relative
proportions of the power of the parties are materially altered.
While the quarrel with Clodius was merely annoying, the change
in the position of Caesar involved a very serious danger for Pompeius;
just as Caesar and his confederates had formerly sought a military
support against him, he found himself now compelled to seek a military
support against Caesar, and, laying aside his haughty privacy,
to come forward as a candidate for some extraordinary magistracy,
which would enable him to hold his place by the side of the governor
of the two Gauls with equal and, if possible, with superior power.
His tactics, like his position, were exactly those of Caesar
during the Mithradatic war.  To balance the military power
of a superior but still remote adversary by the obtaining
of a similar command, Pompeius required in the first instance
the official machinery of government.  A year and a half ago
this had been absolutely at his disposal.  The regents then ruled
the state both by the comitia, which absolutely obeyed them
as the masters of the street, and by the senate, which was
energetically overawed by Caesar; as representative of the coalition
in Rome and as its acknowledged head, Pompeius would have doubtless
obtained from the senate and from the burgesses any decree
which he wished, even if it were against Caesar's interest.
But by the awkward quarrel with Clodius, Pompeius had lost the command
of the streets, and could not expect to carry a proposal in his favour
in the popular assembly.  Things were not quite so unfavourable for him
in the senate; but even there it was doubtful whether Pompeius
after that long and fatal inaction still held the reins of the majority
firmly enough in hand to procure such a decree as he needed.

The Republican Opposition among the Public

The position of the senate also, or rather of the nobility
generally, had meanwhile undergone a change.  From the very fact
of its complete abasement it drew fresh energy.  In the coalition
of 694 various things had come to light, which were by no means
as yet ripe for it.  The banishment of Cato and Cicero--
which public opinion, however much the regents kept themselves
in the background and even professed to lament it, referred
with unerring tact to its real authors--and the marriage-relationship
formed between Caesar and Pompeius suggested to men's minds
with disagreeable clearness monarchical decrees of banishment
and family alliances.  The larger public too, which stood
more aloof from political events, observed the foundations
of the future monarchy coming more and more distinctly into view.
From the moment when the public perceived that Caesar's object
was not a modification of the republican constitution,
but that the question at stake was the existence or non-existence
of the republic, many of the best men, who had hitherto reckoned
themselves of the popular party and honoured in Caesar its head,
must infallibly have passed over to the opposite side.  It was
no longer in the saloons and the country houses of the governing
nobilityalone that men talked of the "three dynasts," of the "three-
headed monster."  The dense crowds of people listened to the consular
orations of Caesar without a sound of acclamation or approval;
not a hand stirred to applaud when the democratic consul entered
the theatre.  But they hissed when one of the tools of the regents
showed himself in public, and even staid men applauded when an actor
utteredan anti-monarchic sentence or an allusion against Pompeius.
Nay, when Cicero was to be banished, a great number of burgesses--
it is said twenty thousand--mostly of the middle classes, put on mourning
after the example of the senate.  "Nothing is now more popular,"
it is said in a letter of this period, "than hatred
of the popular party."

Attempts of the Regents to Check It

The regents dropped hints, that through such opposition the equites
might easily lose their new special places in the theatre,
and the commons their bread-corn; people were therefore somewhat
more guarded perhaps in the expression of their displeasure,
but the feeling remained the same.  The lever of material interests
was applied with better success.  Caesar's gold flowed in streams.
Men of seeming riches whose finances were in disorder, influential
ladies who were in pecuniary embarrassment, insolvent young nobles,
merchants and bankers in difficulties, either went in person
to Gaul with the view of drawing from the fountain-head, or applied
to Caesar's agents in the capital; and rarely was any man
outwardly respectable--Caesar avoided dealings with vagabonds
who were utterly lost--rejected in either quarter.  To this fell
to be added the enormous buildings which Caesar caused to be executed
on his account in the capital--and by which a countless number of men
of all ranks from the consular down to the common porter found
opportunity of profiting--as well as the immense sums expended
for public amusements.  Pompeius did the same on a more limited scale;
to him the capital was indebted for the first theatre of stone,
and he celebrated its dedication with a magnificence never seen before.
Of course such distributions reconciled a number of men
who were inclined towards opposition, more especially in the capital,
to the new order of things up to a certain extent; but the marrow
of the opposition was not to be reached by this system of corruption.
Every day more and more clearly showed how deeply the existing
constitution had struck root among the people, and how little,
in particular, the circles more aloof from direct party-agitation,
especially the country towns, were inclined towards monarchy
or even simply ready to let it take its course.

Increasing Importance of the Senate

If Rome had had a representative constitution, the discontent
of the burgesses would have found its natural expression
in the elections, and have increased by so expressing itself;
under the existing circumstances nothing was left for those
true to the constitution but to place themselves under the senate,
which, degraded as it was, still appeared the representative
and champion of the legitimate republic.  Thus it happened
that the senate, now when it had been overthrown, suddenly found
at its disposal an army far more considerable and far more
earnestly faithful, than when in its power and splendour
it overthrew the Gracchi and under the protection of Sulla's
sword restored the state.  The aristocracy felt this; it began
to bestir itself afresh.  Just at this time Marcus Cicero,
after having bound himself to join the obsequious party
in the senate and not only to offer no opposition, but to work
with all his might for the regents, had obtained from them
permission to return.  Although Pompeius in this matter only made
an incidental concession to the oligarchy, and intended first
of all to play a trick on Clodius, and secondly to acquire
in the fluent consular a tool rendered pliant by sufficient blows,
the opportunity afforded by the return of Cicero was embraced
for republican demonstrations, just as his banishment had been
a demonstration against the senate.  With all possible solemnity,
protected moreover against the Clodians by the band of Titus Annius
Milo, the two consuls, following out a resolution of the senate,
submitted a proposal to the burgesses to permit the return
of the consular Cicero, and the senate called on all burgesses
true to the constitution not to be absent from the vote.
An unusual number of worthy men, especially from the country towns,
actually assembled in Rome on the day of voting (4 Aug. 697).
The journey of the consular from Brundisium to the capital
gave occasion to a series of similar, but not less brilliant
manifestations of public feeling.  The new alliance between the senate
and the burgesses faithful to the constitution was on this occasion
as it were publicly proclaimed, and a sort of review of the latter
was held, the singularly favourable result of which contributed
not a little to revive the sunken courage of the aristocracy.

Helplessness of Pompeius

The helplessness of Pompeius in presence of these daring
demonstrations, as well as the undignified and almost ridiculous
position into which he had fallen with reference to Clodius, deprived
him and the coalition of their credit; and the section of the senate
which adhered to the regents, demoralized by the singular inaptitude
of Pompeius and helplessly left to itself, could not prevent
the republican-aristocratic party from regaining completely
the ascendency in the corporation.  The game of this party
really at that time (697) was still by no means desperate
for a courageous and dexterous player.  It had now--what it had
not possessed for a century past--a firm support in the people;
if it trusted the people and itself, it might attain its object
in the shortest and most honourable way.  Why not attack the regents
openly and avowedly? Why should not a resolute and eminent man
at the head of the senate cancel the extraordinary powers
as unconstitutional, and summon all the republicans of Italy to arms
against the tyrants and their following? It was possible perhaps
in this way once more to restore the rule of the senate.  Certainly
the republicans would thus play a bold game; but perhaps in this case,
as often, the most courageous resolution might have been
at the same time the most prudent.  Only, it is true, the indolent
aristocracy of this period was scarcely capable of so simple
and bold a resolution.  There was however another way perhaps
more sure, at any rate better adapted to the character and nature
of these constitutionalists; they might labour to set the two regents
at variance and through this variance to attain ultimately
to the helm themselves.  The relations between the two men ruling
the state had become altered and relaxed, now that Caesar had acquired
a standing of preponderant power by the side of Pompeius
and had compelled the latter to canvass for a new position of command;
it was probable that, if he obtained it, there would arise in one way
or other a rupture and struggle between them. If Pompeius remained
unsupported in this, his defeat was scarcely doubtful,
and the constitutional party would in that event find themselves
after the close of the conflict under the rule of one master
instead of two.  But if the nobility employed against Caesar
the same means by which the latter had won his previous victories,
and entered into alliance with the weaker competitor, victory
would probably, with a general like Pompeius, and with an army
such as that of the constitutionalists, fall to the coalition;
and to settle matters with Pompeius after the victory could not--
judging from the proofs of political incapacity which he had
already given-appear a specially difficult task.

Attempts of Pompeius to Obtain a Command through the Senate
Administration of the Supplies of Corn

Things had taken such a turn as naturally to suggest an understanding
between Pompeius and the republican party.  Whether such
an approximation was to take place, and what shape the mutual
relations of the two regents and of the aristocracy, which had become
utterly enigmatical, were next to assume, fell necessarily
to be decided, when in the autumn of 697 Pompeius came to the senate
with the proposal to entrust him with extraordinary official power.
He based his proposal once more on that by which he had
eleven years before laid the foundations of his power,
the price of bread in the capital, which had just then--as previously
to the Gabinian law--reached an oppressive height.  Whether
it had been forced up by special machinations, such as Clodius imputed
sometimes to Pompeius, sometimes to Cicero, and these in their turn
charged on Clodius, cannot be determined; the continuance of piracy,
the emptiness of the public chest, and the negligent and disorderly
supervision of the supplies of corn by the government were already
quite sufficient of themselves, even without political forestalling,
to produce scarcities of bread in a great city dependent
almost solely on transmarine supplies.  The plan of Pompeius
was to get the senate to commit to him the superintendence
of the matters relating to corn throughout the whole Roman empire,
and, with a view to this ultimate object, to entrust him
on the one hand with the unlimited disposal of the Roman state-
treasure, and on the other hand with an army and fleet, as well as
a command which not only stretched over the whole Roman empire,
but was superior in each province to that of the governor--in short
he designed to institute an improved edition of the Gabinian law,
to which the conduct of the Egyptian war just then pending(3)
would therefore quite as naturally have been annexed as the conduct
of the Mithradatic war to the razzia against the pirates.
However much the opposition to the new dynasts had gained ground
in recent years, the majority of the senate was still, when this matter
came to be discussed in Sept. 697, under the constraint of the terror
excited by Caesar.  It obsequiously accepted the project in principle,
and that on the proposition of Marcus Cicero, who was expected to give,
and gave, in this case the first proof of the pliableness
learned by him in exile.  But in the settlement of the details
very material portions were abated from the original plan,
which the tribune of the people Gaius Messius submitted.
Pompeius obtained neither free control over the treasury,
nor legions and ships of his own, nor even an authority superior
to that of the governors; but they contented themselves
with granting to him, for the purpose of his organizing
due supplies for the capital, considerable sums, fifteen adjutants,
and in allaffairs elating to the supply of grain full proconsular
power throughout the Roman dominions for the next five years,
and with having this decree confirmed by the burgesses.
There were many different reasons which led to this alteration,
almost equivalent to a rejection, of the original plan: a regard
to Caesar, with reference to whom the most timid could not but have
the greatest scruples in investing his colleague not merely with equal
but with superior authority in Gaul itself; the concealed opposition
of Pompeius' hereditary enemy and reluctant ally Crassus,
to whom Pompeius himself attributed or professed to attribute primarily
the failure of his plan; the antipathy of the republican opposition
in the senate to any decree which really or nominally enlarged
the authority of the regents; lastly and mainly, the incapacity
of Pompeius himself, who even after having been compelled to act
could not prevail on himself to acknowledge his own action, but chose
always to bring forward his real design as it were in incognito
by means of his friends, while he himself in his well-known modesty
declared his willingness to be content with even less.  No wonder
that they took him at his word, and gave him the less.

Egyptian Expedition

Pompeius was nevertheless glad to have found at any rate
a serious employment, and above all a fitting pretext for leaving
the capital.  He succeeded, moreover, in providing it with ampler
and cheaper supplies, although not without the provinces severely
feeling the reflex effect.  But he had missed his real object;
the proconsular title, which he had a right to bear in all the provinces,
remained an empty name, so long as he had not troops of his own
at his disposal.  Accordingly he soon afterwards got a second
proposition made to the senate, that it should confer on him
the charge of conducting back the expelled king of Egypt, if necessary
by force of arms, to his home.  But the more that his urgent need
of the senate became evident, the senators received his wishes
with a less pliant and less respectful spirit.  It was immediately
discovered in the Sibylline oracles that it was impious to send
a Roman army to Egypt; whereupon the pious senate almost
unanimously resolved to abstain from armed intervention.  Pompeius
was already so humbled, that he would have accepted the mission
even without an army; but in his incorrigible dissimulation he left
this also to be declared merely by his friends, and spoke and voted
for the despatch of another senator.  Of course the senate rejected
a proposal which wantonly risked a life so precious to his country;
and the ultimate issue of the endless discussions was the resolution
not to interfere in Egypt at all (Jan. 698).

Attempt at an Aristocratic Restoration
Attack on Caesar's Laws

These repeated repulses which Pompeius met with in the senate and,
what was worse, had to acquiesce in without retaliation,
were naturally regarded--come from what side they would--by the public
at large as so many victories of the republicans and defeats
of the regents generally; the tide of republican opposition
was accordingly always on the increase.  Already the elections for 698
had gone but partially according to the minds of the dynasts; Caesar's
candidates for the praetorship, Publius Vatinius and Gaius Alfius,
had failed, while two decided adherents of the fallen government,
Gnaeus Lentulus Marcellinus and Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus,
had been elected, the former as consul, the latter as praetor.
But for 699 there even appeared as candidate for the consulship
Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, whose election it was difficult to prevent
owing to his influence in the capital and his colossal wealth, and who,
it was sufficiently well known, would not be content with a concealed
opposition.  The comitia thus rebelled; and the senate chimed in.
It solemnly deliberated over an opinion, which Etruscan soothsayers
of acknowledged wisdom had furnished respecting certain signs
and wonders at its special request.  The celestial revelation announced
that through the dissension of the upper classes the whole power
over the army and treasure threatened to pass to one ruler,
and the state to incur loss of freedom--it seemed that the gods
pointed primarily at the proposal of Gaius Messius.  The republicans
soon descended from heaven to earth.  The law as to the domain of Capua
and the other laws issued by Caesar as consul had been constantly
described by them as null and void, and an opinion had been expressed
in the senate as early as Dec. 697 that it was necessary to cancel
them on account of their informalities.  On the 6th April 698
the consular Cicero proposed in a full senate to put the consideration
of the Campanian land distribution in the order of the day
for the 15th May.  It was the formal declaration of war;
and it was the more significant, that it came from the mouth
of one of those men who only show their colours when they think
that they can do so with safety.  Evidently the aristocracy held
that the moment had come for beginning the struggle not with Pompeius
against Caesar, but against the -tyrannis- generally.  What would
further follow might easily be seen.  Domitius made no secret
that he intended as consul to propose to the burgesses
the immediate recall of Caesar from Gaul.  An aristocratic restoration
was at work; and with the attack on the colony of Capua the nobility
threw down the gauntlet to the regents.

Conference of the Regents at Luca

Caesar, although receiving from day to day detailed accounts
of the events in the capital and, whenever military considerations
allowed, watching their progress from as near a point of his
southern province as possible, had not hitherto, visibly at least
interfered in them.  But now war had been declared against him
as well as his colleague, in fact against him especially;
he was compelled to act, and he acted quickly.  He happened
to be in the very neighbourhood; the aristocracy had not even
found it advisable to delay the rupture, till he should have again
crossed the Alps.  In the beginning of April 698 Crassus
left the capital, to concert the necessary measures with his
more powerful colleague; he found Caesar in Ravenna.  Thence
both proceeded to Luca, and there they were joined by Pompeius,
who had departed from Rome soon after Crassus (11 April),
ostensibly for the purpose of procuring supplies of grain
from Sardinia and Africa.  The most noted adherents of the regents,
such as Metellus Nepos the proconsul of Hither Spain, Appius Claudius
the propraetor of Sardinia, and many others, followed them;
a hundred and twenty lictors, and upwards of two hundred senators
were counted at this conference, where already the new monarchical
senate was represented in contradistinction to the republican.
In every respect the decisive voice lay with Caesar.  He used it
to re-establish and consolidate the existing joint rule
on a new basis of more equal distribution of power of most importance
in a military point of view, next to that of the two Gauls,
were assigned to his two colleagues--that of the two Spains
to Pompeius, that of Syria to Crassus; and these offices
were to be secured to them by decree of the people for five years
(700-704), and to be suitably provided for in a military
and financial point of view.  On the other hand Caesar stipulated
for the prolongation of his command, which expired with the year 700,
to the close of 705, as well as for the prerogative of increasing
his legions to ten and of charging the pay for the troops
arbitrarily levied by him on the state-chest.  Pompeius and Crassus
were moreover promised a second consulship for the next year (699)
before they departed for their governorships, while Caesar kept it
open to himself to administer the supreme magistracy a second time
after the termination of his governorship in 706, when the ten years'
interval legally requisite between two consulships should have
in his case elapsed.  The military support, which Pompeius
and Crassus required for regulating the affairs of the capital
all the more that the legions of Caesar originally destined
for this purpose could not now be withdrawn from Transalpine Gaul,
was to be found in new legions, which they were to raise for the Spanish
and Syrian armies and were not to despatch from Italy to their several
destinations until it should seem to themselves convenient
to do so.  The main questions were thus settled; subordinate matters,
such as the settlement of the tactics to be followed against
the opposition in the capital, the regulation of the candidatures
for the ensuing years, and the like, did not long detain them.
The great master of mediation composed the personal differences
which stood in the way of an agreement with his wonted ease,
and compelled the most refractory elements to act in concert.
An understanding befitting colleagues was reestablished,
externally at least, between Pompeius and Crassus.  Even Publius Clodius
was induced to keep himself and his pack quiet, and to give
no farther annoyance to Pompeius--not the least marvellous feat
of the mighty magician.

Designs of Caesar in This Arrangement

That this whole settlement of the pending questions proceeded,
not from a compromise among independent and rival regents meeting
on equal terms, but solely from the good will of Caesar, is evident
from the circumstances.  Pompeius appeared at Luca in the painful
position of a powerless refugee, who comes to ask aid from his opponent.
Whether Caesar chose to dismiss him and to declare the coalition
dissolved, or to receive him and to let the league continue
just as it stood--Pompeius was in either view politically
annihilated.  If he did not in this case break with Caesar, he became
the powerless client of his confederate.  If on the other hand
he did break with Caesar and, which was not very probable,
effected even now a coalition with the aristocracy, this alliance
between opponents, concluded under pressure of necessity
and at the last moment, was so little formidable that it was hardly
for the sake of averting it that Caesar agreed to those concessions.
A serious rivalry on the part of Crassus with Caesar was utterly
impossible.  It is difficult to say what motives induced Caesar
to surrender without necessity his superior position,
and now voluntarily to concede--what he had refused to his rival
even on the conclusion of the league of 694, and what the latter
had since, with the evident design of being armed against Caesar,
vainly striven in different ways to attain without, nay against,
Caesar's will--the second consulate and military power.  Certainly
it was not Pompeius alone that was placed at the head of an army,
but also his old enemy and Caesar's ally throughout many years, Crassus;
and undoubtedly Crassus obtained his respectable military position
merely as a counterpoise to the new power of Pompeius.  Nevertheless
Caesar was a great loser, when his rival exchanged his former
powerlessness for an important command.  It is possible
that Caesar did not yet feel himself sufficiently master of his soldiers
to lead them with confidence to a warfare against the formal
authorities of the land, and was therefore anxious not to be forced
to civil war now by being recalled from Gaul; but whether civil war
should come or not, depended at the moment far more on the aristocracy
of the capital than on Pompeius, and this would have been
at most a reason for Caesar not breaking openly with Pompeius,
so that the opposition might not be emboldened by this breach,
but not a reason for conceding to him what he did concede.
Purely personal motives may have contributed to the result;
it may be that Caesar recollected how he had once stood in a position
of similar powerlessness in presence of Pompeius, and had been saved
from destruction only by his--pusillanimous, it is true, rather than
magnanimous--retirement; it is probable that Caesar hesitated
to breakthe heart of his beloved daughter who was sincerely attached
to her husband--in his soul there was room for much besides the statesman.
But the decisive reason was doubtless the consideration of Gaul.
Caesar--differing from his biographers--regarded the subjugation
of Gaul not as an incidental enterprise useful to him
for the gaining of the crown, but as one on which depended
the external security and the internal reorganization, in a word
the future, of his country.  That he might be enabled to complete
this conquest undisturbed and might not be obliged to take in hand
just at once the extrication of Italian affairs, he unhesitatingly
gave up his superiority over his rivals and granted to Pompeius
sufficient power to settle matters with the senate and its adherents.
This was a grave political blunder, if Caesar had no other object
than to become as quickly as possible king of Rome; but the ambition
of that rare man was not confined to the vulgar aim of a crown.
He had the boldness to prosecute side by side, and to complete,
two labours equally vast--the arranging of the internal affairs
of Italy, and the acquisition and securing of a new and fresh soil
for Italian civilization.  These tasks of course interfered
with each other; his Gallic conquests hindered much more than helped
him on his way to the throne.  It was fraught to him with bitter fruit
that, instead of settling the Italian revolution in 698,
he  postponed it to 706.  But as a statesman as well as a general
Caesar was a peculiarly daring player, who, confiding in himself
and despising his opponents, gave them always great
and sometimes extravagant odds.

The Aristocracy Submits

It was now therefore the turn of the aristocracy to make good
their high gage, and to wage war as boldly as they had boldly
declared it.  But there is no more pitiable spectacle
than when cowardly men have the misfortune to take a bold resolution.
They had simply exercised no foresight at all.  It seemed to have
occurred to nobody that Caesar would possibly stand on his defence,
or that Pompeius and Crassus would combine with him afresh
and more closely than ever.  This seems incredible; but it becomes
intelligible, when we glance at the persons who then led
the constitutional opposition in the senate.  Cato was still absent;(4)
the most influential man in the senate at this time was Marcus Bibulus,
the hero of passive resistance, the most obstinate and most stupid
of all consulars.  They had taken up arms only to lay them down,
so soon as the adversary merely put his hand to the sheath;
the bare news of the conferences in Luca sufficed to suppress
all thought of a serious opposition and to bring the mass
of the timid--that is, the immense majority of the senate--
back to their duty as subjects, which in an unhappy hour
they had abandoned.  There was no further talk of the appointed
discussion to try the validity of the Julian laws; the legions raised
by Caesar on his own behalf were charged by decree of the senate
on the public chest; the attempts on occasion of regulating
the next consular provinces to take away both Gauls or one of them
by decree from Caesar were rejected by the majority (end of May 698).
Thus the corporation did public penance.  In secret the individual lords,
one after another, thoroughly frightened at their own temerity,
came to make their peace and vow unconditional obedience--
none more quickly than Marcus Cicero, who repented too late
of his perfidy, and in respect of the most recent period of his life
clothed himself with titles of honour which were altogether
more appropriate than flattering.(5) Of course the regents agreed
to be pacified; they refused nobody pardon, for there was nobody
who was worth the trouble of making him an exception.  That we may
see how suddenly the tone in aristocratic circles changed
after the resolutions of Luca became known, it is worth while
to compare the pamphlets given forth by Cicero shortly before
with the palinode which he caused to be issued to evince publicly
his repentance and his good intentions.(6)

Settlement of the New Monarchical Rule

The regents could thus arrange Italian affairs at their pleasure
and more thoroughly than before.  Italy and the capital
obtained practically a garrison although not assembled in arms,
and one of the regents as commandant.  Of the troops levied for Syria
and Spain by Crassus and Pompeius, those destined for the east no doubt
took their departure; but Pompeius caused the two Spanish provinces
to be administered by his lieutenants with the garrison hitherto
stationed there, while he dismissed the officers and soldiers
of the legions which were newly raised--nominally for despatch
to Spain--on furlough, and remained himself with them in Italy.

Doubtless the tacit resistance of public opinion increased,
the more clearly and generally men perceived that the regents
were working to put an end to the old constitution and with as much
gentleness as possible to accommodate the existing condition
of the government and administration to the forms of the monarchy;
but they submitted, because they were obliged to submit.
First of all all the more important affairs, and particularly
all that related to military matters and external relations,
were disposed of without consulting the senate upon them,
sometimes by decree of the people, sometimes by the mere good
pleasure of the rulers.  The arrangements agreed on at Luca respecting
the military command of Gaul were submitted directly to the burgesses
by Crassus and Pompeius, those relating to Spain and Syria by the tribune
of the people Gaius Trebonius, and in other instances the more important
governorships were frequently filled up by decree of the people.
That the regents did not need the consent of the authorities
to increase their troops at pleasure, Caesar had already sufficiently
shown: as little did they hesitate mutually to borrow troops;
Caesar for instance received such collegiate support from Pompeius
for the Gallic, and Crassus from Caesar for the Parthian, war.
The Transpadanes, who possessed according to the existing constitution
only Latin rights, were treated by Caesar during his administration
practically as full burgesses of Rome.(7)  While formerly
the organization of newly-acquired territories had been managed
by a senatorial commission, Caesar organized his extensive Gallic
conquests altogether according to his own judgment, and founded,
for instance, without having received any farther full powers
burgess-colonies, particularly Novum-Comum (Como) with five thousand
colonists.  Piso conducted the Thracian, Gabinius the Egyptian,
Crassus the Parthian war, without consulting the senate,
and without even reporting, as was usual, to that body;
in like manner triumphs and other marks of honour were accorded
and carried out, without the senate being asked about them.
Obviously this did not arise from a mere neglect of forms, which would
be the less intelligible, seeing that in the great majority of cases
no opposition from the senate was to be expected.  On the contrary,
it was a well-calculated design to dislodge the senate from the domain
of military arrangements and of higher politics, and to restrict
its share of administration to financial questions and internal
affairs; and even opponents plainly discerned this and protested,
so far as they could, against this conduct of the regents by means
of senatorial decrees and criminal actions.  While the regents
thus in the main set aside the senate, they still made some use
of the less dangerous popular assemblies--care was taken that in these
the lords of the street should put no farther difficulty in the way
of the lords of the state; in many cases however they dispensed
even with this empty shadow, and employed without disguise
autocratic forms.

The Senate under the Monarchy
Cicero and the Majority

The humbled senate had to submit to its position
whether it would or not.  The leader of the compliant majority
continued to be Marcus Cicero.  He was useful on account
of his lawyer's talent of finding reasons, or at any rate words,
for everything; and there was a genuine Caesarian irony
in employing the man, by means of whom mainly the aristocracy
had conducted their demonstrations against the regents,
as the mouthpiece of servility.  Accordingly they pardoned him
for his brief desire to kick against the pricks, not however
without having previously assured themselves of his submissiveness
in every way.  His brother had been obliged to take the position
of an officer in the Gallic army to answer in some measure
as a hostage for him; Pompeius had compelled Cicero himself
to accept a lieutenant-generalship under him, which furnished
a handle for politely banishing him at any moment.  Clodius
had doubtless been instructed to leave him meanwhile at peace,
but Caesar as little threw off Clodius on account of Cicero
as he threw off Cicero on account of Clodius; and the great saviour
of his country and the no less great hero of liberty entered
into an antechamber-rivalry in the headquarters of Samarobriva,
for the befitting illustration of which there lacked, unfortunately,
a Roman Aristophanes.  But not only was the same rod kept in suspense
over Cicero's head, which had once already descended on him
so severely; golden fetters were also laid upon him.  Amidst
the serious embarrassment of his finances the loans of Caesar
free of interest, and the joint overseership of those buildings
which occasioned the circulation of enormous sums in the capital,
were in a high degree welcome to him; and many an immortal oration
for the senate was nipped in the bud by the thought of Caesar's agent,
who might present a bill to him after the close of the sitting.
Consequently he vowed "in future to ask no more after right and honour,
but to strive for the favour of the regents," and "to be as flexible
as an ear-lap." They used him accordingly as--what he was good for--
an advocate; in which capacity it was on various occasions
his lot to be obliged to defend his very bitterest foes
at a higher bidding, and that especially in the senate,
where he almost regularly served as the organ of the dynasts
and submitted the proposals "to which others probably consented,
but not he himself"; indeed, as recognized leader of the majority
of the compliant, he obtained even a certain political importance.
They dealt with the other members of the governing corporation
accessible to fear, flattery, or gold in the same way as they had dealt
with Cicero, and succeeded in keeping it on the whole in subjection.

Cato and the Minority

Certainly there remained a section of their opponents, who at least
kept to their colours and were neither to be terrified nor to be won.
The regents had become convinced that exceptional measures,
such as those against Cato and Cicero, did their cause
more harm than good, and that it was a lesser evil to tolerate
an inconvenient republican opposition than to convert their opponents
into martyrs for the republic Therefore they allowed Cato to return
(end of 698) and thenceforward in the senate and in the Forum,
often at the peril of his life, to offer a continued opposition
to the regents, which was doubtless worthy of honour, but unhappily
was at the same time ridiculous.  They allowed him on occasion
of the proposals of Trebonius to push matters once more
to a hand-to-hand conflict in the Forum, and to submit to the senate
a proposal that the proconsul Caesar should be given over
to the Usipetes and Tencteri on account of his perfidious conduct
toward those barbarians.(8)  They were patient when Marcus Favonius,
Cato's Sancho, after the senate had adopted the resolution
to charge the legions of Caesar on the state-chest, sprang to the door
of the senate-house and proclaimed to the streets the danger
of the country; when the same person in his scurrilous fashion
called the white bandage, which Pompeius wore round his weak leg,
a displaced diadem; when the consular Lentulus Marcellinus,
on being applauded, called out to the assembly to make diligent use
of this privilege of expressing their opinion now while they were
still allowed to do so; when the tribune of the people
Gaius Ateius Capito consigned Crassus on his departure for Syria,
with all the formalities of the theology of the day, publicly
to the evil spirits.  These were, on the whole, vain demonstrations
of an irritated minority; yet the little party from which they issued
was so far of importance, that it on the one hand fostered and gave
the watchword to the republican opposition fermenting in secret,
and on the other hand now and then dragged the majority of the senate,
which ithal cherished at bottom quite the same sentiments with reference
to the regents, into an isolated decree directed against them.
For even the majority felt the need of giving vent, at least
sometimes and in subordinate matters to their suppressed indignation,
and especially--after the manner of those who are servile
with reluctance--of exhibiting their resentment towards the great foes
in rage against the small.  Wherever it was possible, a gentle blow
was administered to the instruments of the regents; thus Gabinius
was refused the thanksgiving-festival that he asked (698);
thus Piso was recalled from his province; thus mourning was put on
by the senate, when the tribune of the people Gaius Cato hindered
the elections for 699 as long as the consul Marcellinus belonging
to the constitutional party was in office.  Even Cicero, however humbly
he always bowed before the regents, issued an equally envenomed
and insipid pamphlet against Caesar's father-in-law.  But both these
feeble signs of opposition by the majority of the senate
and the ineffectual resistance of the minority show only
the more clearly, that the government had now passed from the senate
to the regents as it formerly passed from the burgesses to the senate;
and that the senate was already not much more than a monarchical
council of state employed also to absorb the anti-monarchical
elements.  "No man," the adherents of the fallen government complained,
"is of the slightest account except the three; the regents
are all-powerful, and they take care that no one shall remain
in doubt about it; the whole senate is virtually transformed
and obeys the dictators; our generation will not live to see
a change of things."  They were living in fact no longer
under the republic, but under monarchy.

Continued Oppositon at the Elections

But if the guidance of the state was at the absolute disposal
of the regents, there remained still a political domain separated
in some measure from the government proper, which it was more easy
to defend and more difficult to conquer; the field of the ordinary
elections of magistrates, and that of the jury-courts.  That the latter
do not fall directly under politics, but everywhere, and above all
in Rome, come partly under the control of the spirit dominating
state-affairs, is of itself clear.  The elections of magistrates
certainly belonged by right to the government proper of the state;
but, as at this period the state was administered substantially
by extraordinary magistrates or by men wholly without title,
and even the supreme ordinary magistrates, if they belonged
to the anti-monarchical party, were not able in any tangible way
to influence the state-machinery, the ordinary magistrates sank
more and more into mere puppets--as, in fact, even those of them
who were most disposed to opposition described themselves frankly
and with entire justice as powerless ciphers--and their elections
therefore sank into mere demonstrations.  Thus, after the opposition
had already been wholly dislodged from the proper field of battle,
hostilities might nevertheless be continued in the field of elections
and of processes.  The regents spared no pains to remain victors
also in this field.  As to the elections, they had already
at Luca settled between themselves the lists of candidates
for the next years, and they left no means untried to carry
the candidates agreed upon there.  They expended their gold primarily
for the purpose of influencing the elections.  A great number
of soldiers were dismissed annually on furlough from the armies
of Caesar and Pompeius to take part in the voting at Rome.
Caesar was wont himself to guide, and watch over, the election movements
from as near a point as possible of Upper Italy.  Yet the object
was but very imperfectly attained.  For 699 no doubt Pompeius
and Crassus were elected consuls, agreeably to the convention of Luca,
and Lucius Domitius, the only candidate of the opposition who persevered
was set aside; but this had been effected only by open violence,
on which occasion Cato was wounded and other extremely scandalous
incidents occurred.  In the next consular elections for 700,
in spite of all the exertions of the regents, Domitius was
actually elected, and Cato likewise now prevailed in the candidature
for the praetorship, in which to the scandal of the whole burgesses
Caesar's client Vatinius had during the previous year beaten him
off the field.  At the elections for 701 the opposition succeeded
in so indisputably convicting the candidates of the regents,
along with others, of the most shameful electioneering intrigues
that the regents, on whom the scandal recoiled, could not do otherwise
than abandon them.  These repeated and severe defeats of the dynasts
on the battle-field of the elections may be traceable in part
to the unmanageableness of the rusty machinery, to the incalculable
accidents of the polling, to the opposition at heart of the middle
classes, to the various private considerations that interfere
in such cases and often strangely clash with those of party;
but the main cause lies elsewhere.  The elections were at this time
essentially in the power of the different clubs into which the aristocracy
had grouped themselves; the system of bribery was organized by them
on the most extensive scale and with the utmost method.
The same aristocracy therefore, which was represented in the senate,
ruled also the elections; but while in the senate it yielded
with a grudge, it worked and voted here--in secret and secure
from all reckoning--absolutely against the regents.  That the influence
of the nobility in this field was by no means broken by the strict
penal law against the electioneering intrigues of the clubs,
which Crassus when consul in 699 caused to be confirmed by the burgesses,
is self-evident, and is shown by the elections of the succeeding years.

And in the Courts

The jury-courts occasioned equally great difficulty to the regents.
As they were then composed, while the senatorial nobility was here
also influential, the decisive voice lay chiefly with the middle class.
The fixing of a high-rated census for jurymen by a law proposed
by Pompeius in 699 is a remarkable proof that the opposition
to the regents had its chief seat in the middle class properly
so called, and that the great capitalists showed themselves here,
as everywhere, more compliant than the latter. Nevertheless
the republican party was not yet deprived of all hold in the courts,
and it was never weary of directing political impeachments,
not indeed against the regents themselves, but against
their prominent instruments.  This warfare of prosecutions
was waged the more keenly, that according to usage the duty of accusation
belonged to the senatorial youth, and, as may readily be conceived,
there was more of republican passion, fresh talent, and bold delight
in attack to be found among these youths than among the older members
of their order.  Certainly the courts were not free; if the regents
were in earnest, the courts ventured as little as the senate
to refuse obedience.  None of their antagonists were prosecuted
by the opposition with such hatred--so furious that it almost
passed into a proverb--as Vatinius, by far the most audacious
and unscrupulous of the closer adherents of Caesar; but his master
gave the command, and he was acquitted in all the processes
raised against him.  But impeachments by men who knew how to wield
the sword of dialectics and the lash of sarcasm as did
Gaius Licinius Calvus and Gaius Asinius Pollio, did not miss
their mark even when they failed; nor were isolated successes wanting.
They were mostly, no doubt, obtained over subordinate individuals,
but even one of the most high-placed and most hated adherents
of the dynasts, the consular Gabinius, was overthrown in this way.
Certainly in his case the implacable hatred of the aristocracy,
which as little forgave him for the law regarding the conducting
of the war with the pirates as for his disparaging treatment
of the senate during his Syrian governorship, was combined
with the rage of the great capitalists, against whom he had when governor
of Syria ventured to defend the interests of the provincials,
and even with the resentment of Crassus, with whom he had stood
on ceremony in handing over to him the province.  His only protection
against all these foes was Pompeius, and the latter had every reason
to defend his ablest, boldest, and most faithful adjutant at any price;
but here, as everywhere, he knew not how to use his power
and to defend his clients, as Caesar defended his; in the end
of 700 the jurymen found Gabinius guilty of extortions
and sent him into banishment.

On the whole, therefore, in the sphere of the popular elections
and of the jury-courts it was the regents that fared worst.
The factors which ruled in these were less tangible, and therefore
more difficult to be terrified or corrupted than the direct organs
of government and administration.  The holders of power encountered
here, especially in the popular elections, the tough energy
of a close oligarchy--grouped in coteries--which is by no means
finally disposed of when its rule is overthrown, and which is
the more difficult to vanquish the more covert its action.
They encountered here too, especially in the jury-courts,
the repugnance of the middle classes towards the new monarchical rule,
which with all the perplexities springing out of it they were
as little able to remove.  They suffered in both quarters a series
of defeats.  The election-victories of the opposition had,
it is true, merely the value of demonstrations, since the regents
possessed and employed the means of practically annulling any magistrate
whom they disliked; but the criminal trials in which the opposition
carried condemnations deprived them, in a way keenly felt,
of useful auxiliaries.  As things stood, the regents could neither
set aside nor adequately control the popular elections
and the jury-courts, and the opposition, however much it felt itself
straitened even here, maintained to a certain extent the field of battle.

Literature of the Opposition

It proved, however, yet a more difficult task to encounter
the opposition in a field, to which it turned with the greater zeal
the more it was dislodged from direct political action.  This was
literature.  Even the judicial opposition was at the same time
a literary one, and indeed pre-eminently so, for the orations
were regularly published and served as political pamphlets.
The arrows of poetry hit their mark still more rapidly and sharply.
The lively youth of the high aristocracy, and still more energetically
perhaps the cultivated middle class in the Italian country towns,
waged the war of pamphlets and epigrams with zeal and success.
There fought side by side on this field the genteel senator's son
Gaius Licinius Calvus (672-706) who was as much feared
in the character of an orator and pamphleteer as of a versatile poet,
and the municipals of Cremona and Verona Marcus Furius Bibaculus
(652-691) and Quintus Valerius Catullus (667-c. 700) whose elegant
and pungent epigrams flew swiftly like arrows through Italy
and were sure to hit their mark.  An oppositional tone prevails
throughout the literature of these years.  It is full of indignant
sarcasm against the "great Caesar," "the unique general,"
against the affectionate father-in-law and son-in-law,
who ruin the whole globe in order to give their dissolute favourites
opportunity to parade the spoils of the long-haired Celts
through the streets of Rome, to furnish royal banquets with the booty
of the farthest isles of the west, and as rivals showering gold
to supplant honest youths at home in the favour of their mistresses.
There is in the poems of Catullus(9) and the other fragments
of the literature of this period something of that fervour of personal
and political hatred, of that republican agony overflowing
in riotous humour or in stern despair, which are more prominently
and powerfully apparent in Aristophanes and Demosthenes.

The most sagacious of the three rulers at least saw well
that it was as impossible to despise this opposition as to suppress
it by word of command.  So far as he could, Caesar tried
rather personally to gain over the more notable authors.
Cicero himself had to thank his literary reputation in good part
for the respectful treatment which he especially experienced
from Caesar; but the governor of Gaul did not disdain to conclude
a special peace even with Catullus himself through the intervention
of his father who had become personally known to him in Verona;
and the young poet, who had just heaped upon the powerful general
the bitterest and most personal sarcasms, was treated by him
with the most flattering distinction.  In fact Caesar was gifted enough
to follow his literary opponents on their own domain and to publish--
as an indirect way of repelling manifold attacks--a detailed report
on the Gallic wars, which set forth before the public, with happily
assumed naivete, the necessity and constitutional propriety
of his military operations.  But it is freedom alone that is absolutely
and exclusively poetical and creative; it and it alone is able
even in its most wretched caricature, even with its latest breath,
to inspire fresh enthusiasm.  All the sound elements of literature
were and remained anti-monarchical; and, if Caesar himself
could venture on this domain without proving a failure, the reason
was merely that even now he still cherished at heart the magnificent
dream of a free commonwealth, although he was unable to transfer it
either to his adversaries or to his adherents.  Practical politics
was not more absolutely controlled by the regents than literature
by the republicans.(10)

New Exceptional Measures Resolved on

It became necessary to take serious steps against this opposition,
which was powerless indeed, but was always becoming more troublesome
and audacious.  The condemnation of Gabinius, apparently,
turned the scale (end of 700).  The regents agreed to introduce
a dictatorship, though only a temporary one, and by means of this
to carry new coercive measures especially respecting the elections
and the jury-courts.  Pompeius, as the regent on whom primarily devolved
the government of Rome and Italy, was charged with the execution
of this resolve; which accordingly bore the impress of the awkwardness
in resolution and action that characterized him, and of his singular
incapacity of speaking out frankly, even where he would and could
command.  Already at the close of 700 the demand for a dictatorship
was brought forward in the senate in the form of hints,
and that not by Pompeius himself.  There served as its ostensible ground
the continuance of the system of clubs and bands in the capital,
which by acts of bribery and violence certainly exercised
the most pernicious pressure on the elections as well as
on the jury-courts and kept it in a perpetual state of disturbance;
we must allow that this rendered it easy for the regents to justify
their exceptional measures.  But, as may well be conceived,
even the servile majority shrank from granting what the future dictator
himself seemed to shrink from openly asking.  When the unparalleled
agitation regarding the elections for the consulship of 701
led to the most scandalous scenes, so  that the elections
were postponed a full year beyond the fixed time and only took place
after a seven months' interregnum in July 701, Pompeius found
in this state of things the desired occasion for indicating
now distinctly to the senate that the dictatorship was the only means
of cutting, if not of loosing the knot; but the decisive
word of command was not even yet spoken.  Perhaps it would have
still remained for long unuttered, had not the most audacious
partisan of the republican opposition Titus Annius Milo
stepped into the field at the consular elections for 702
as a candidate in opposition to the candidates of the regents,
Quintus Metellus Scipio and Publius Plautius Hypsaeus, both men
closely connected with Pompeius personally and thoroughly devoted to him.

Milo
Killing of Clodius

Milo, endowed with physical courage, with a certain talent for intrigue
and for contracting debt, and above all with an ample amount
of native assurance which had been carefully cultivated,
had made himself a name among the political adventurers
of the time, and was the greatest bully in his trade next to Clodius,
and naturally therefore through rivalry at the most deadly feud
with the latter.  As this Achilles of the streets had been acquired
by the regents and with their permission was again playing the ultra-
democrat, the Hector of the streets became as a matter of course
an aristocrat!  And the republican opposition, which now would have
concluded an alliance with Catilina in person, had he presented
himself to them, readily acknowledged Milo as their legitimate
champion in all riots.  In fact the few successes, which they
carried off in this field of battle, were the work of Milo
and of his well-trained band of gladiators.  So Cato and his friends
in return supported the candidature of Milo for the consulship;
even Cicero could not avoid recommending one who had been his enemy's
enemy and his own protector during many years; and as Milo himself
spared neither money nor violence to carry his election,
it seemed secured.  For the regents it would have been not only
a new and keenly-felt defeat, but also a real danger; for it was
to be foreseen that the bold partisan would not allow himself
as consul to be reduced to insignificance so easily as Domitius
and other men of the respectable opposition.  It happened that Achilles
and Hector accidentally encountered each other not far from the capital
on the Appian Way, and a fray arose between their respective bands,
in which Clodius himself received a sword-cut on the shoulder
and was compelled to take refuge in a neighbouring house.
This had occurred without orders from Milo; but, as the matter
had gone so far and as the storm had now to be encountered at any rate,
the whole crime seemed to Milo more desirable and even less dangerous
than the half; he ordered his men to drag Clodius forth
from his lurking place and to put him to death (13 Jan. 702).

Anarchy in Rome

The street leaders of the regents' party--the tribunes of the people
Titus Munatius Plancus, Quintus Pompeius Rufus, and Gaius
Sallustius Crispus--saw in this occurrence a fitting opportunity
to thwart in the interest of their masters the candidature of Milo
and carry the dictatorship of Pompeius.  The dregs of the populace,
especially the freedmen and slaves, had lost in Clodius
their patron and future deliverer;(11) the requisite excitement
was thus easily aroused.  After the bloody corpse had been exposed
for show at the orators' platform in the Forum and the speeches
appropriate to the occasion had been made, the riot broke forth.
The seat of the perfidious aristocracy was destined as a funeral pile
for the great liberator; the mob carried the body to the senate-house,
and set the building on fire.  Thereafter the multitude proceeded
to the front of Milo's house and kept it under siege, till his band
drove off the assailants by discharges of arrows.  They passed
on to the house of Pompeius and of his consular candidates,
of whom the former was saluted as dictator and the latter as consuls,
and thence to the house of the interrex Marcus Lepidus, on whom
devolved the conduct of the consular elections.  When the latter,
as in duty bound, refused to make arrangements for the elections
immediately, as the clamorous multitude demanded, he was kept
during five days under siege in his dwelling house.

Dictatorship of Pompeius

But the instigators of these scandalous scenes had overacted
their part.  Certainly their lord and master was resolved to employ
this favourable episode in order not merely to set aside Milo,
but also to seize the dictatorship; he wished, however, to receive it
not from a mob of bludgeon-men, but from the senate.  Pompeius brought
up troops to put down the anarchy which prevailed in the capital,
and which had in reality become intolerable to everybody;
at the same time he now enjoined what he had hitherto requested,
and the senate complied.  It was merely an empty subterfuge,
that on the proposal of Cato and Bibulus the proconsul Pompeius,
retaining his former offices, was nominated as "consul without
colleague" instead of dictator on the 25th of the intercalary
month(12) (702)--a subterfuge, which admitted an appellation labouring
under a double incongruity(13) for the mere purpose of avoiding
one which expressed the simple fact, and which vividly reminds us
of the sagacious resolution of the waning patriciate to concede
to the plebeians not the consulship, but only the consular power.(14)

Changes of in the Arrangement of Magistracies and the Jury-System

Thus in legal possession of full power, Pompeius set to work
and proceeded with energy against the republican party which was
powerful in the clubs and the jury-courts.  The existing enactments
as to elections were repeated and enforced by a special law;
and by another against electioneering intrigues, which obtained
retrospective force for all offences of this sort committed
since 684, the penalties hitherto imposed were augmented.
Still more important was the enactment, that the governorships,
which were by far the more important and especially by far
the more lucrative half of official life, should be conferred
on the consuls and praetors not immediately on their retirement
from the consulate or praetorship, but only after the expiry
of other five years; an arrangement which of course could only
come into effect after four years, and therefore made the filling up
of the governorships for the next few years substantially dependent
on decrees of senate which were to be issued for the regulation
of this interval, and thus practically on the person or section
ruling the senate at the moment.  The jury-commissions were left
in existence, but limits were put to the right of counter-plea,
and--what was perhaps still more important--the liberty of speech
in the courts was done away; for both the number of the advocates
and the time of speaking apportioned to each were restricted
by fixing a maximum, and the bad habit which had prevailed of adducing,
in addition to the witnesses as to facts, witnesses to character
or -laudatores-, as they were called, in favour of the accused
was prohibited.  The obsequious senate further decreed on the suggestion
of Pompeius that the country had been placed in peril by the quarrel
on the Appian Way; accordingly a special commission was appointed
by an exceptional law for all crimes connected with it,
the members of which were directly nominated by Pompeius.
An attempt was also made to give once more a serious importance
to the office of the censors, and by that agency to purge
the deeply disordered burgess-body of the worst rabble.

All these measures were adopted under the pressure of the sword.
In consequence of the declaration of the senate that the country
was in danger, Pompeius called the men capable of service
throughout Italy to arms and made them swear allegiance
for all contingencies; an adequate and trustworthy corps
was temporarily stationed at the Capitol; at every stirring
of opposition Pompeius threatened armed intervention, and during
the proceedings at the trial respecting the murder of Clodius
stationed contrary to all precedent, a guard over the place
of trial itself.

Humiliation of the Republicans

The scheme for the revival of the censorship failed, because
among the servile majority of the senate no one possessed
sufficient moral courage and authority even to become a candidate
for such an office.  On the other hand Milo was condemned
by the jurymen (8 April 702) and Cato's candidature for the consulship
of 703was frustrated.  The opposition of speeches and pamphlets
received through the new judicial ordinance a blow from which
it never recovered; the dreaded forensic eloquence was thereby
driven from the field of politics, and thenceforth felt
the restraints of monarchy.  Opposition of course had not disappeared
either from the minds of the great majority of the nation
or even wholly from public life--to effect that end the popular elections,
the jury-courts, and literature must have been not merely restricted,
but annihilated.  Indeed, in these very transactions themselves,
Pompeius by his unskilfulness and perversity helped the republicans
to gain even under his dictatorship several triumphs which
he severely felt.  The special measures, which the rulers took
to strengthen their power, were of course officially characterized
as enactments made in the interest of public tranquillity and order,
and every burgess, who did not desire anarchy, was described
as substantially concurring in them.  But Pompeius pushed
this transparent fiction so far, that instead of putting
safe instruments into the special commission for the investigation
of the last tumult, he chose the most respectable men of all parties,
including even Cato, and applied his influence over the court essentially
to maintain order, and to render it impossible for his adherents
as well as for his opponents to indulge in the scenes of disturbance
customary in the courts of this period.  This neutrality of the regent
was discernible in the judgments of the special court.  The jurymen
did not venture to acquit Milo himself; but most of the subordinate
persons accused belonging to the party of the republican opposition
were acquitted, while condemnation inexorably befell those
who in the last riot had taken part for Clodius, or in other words
for the regents, including not a few of Caesar's and of Pompeius' own
most intimate friends--even Hypsaeus his candidate for the consulship,
and the tribunes of the people Plancus and Rufus, who had directed
the -emeute- in his interest.  That Pompeius did not prevent
their condemnation for the sake of appearing impartial, was one specimen
of his folly; and a second was, that he withal in matters
quite indifferent violated his own laws to favour his friends--
appearing for example as a witness to character in the trial of Plancus,
and in fact protecting from condemnation several accused persons
specially connected with him, such as Metellus Scipio.  As usual,
he wished here also to accomplish opposite things; in attempting
to satisfy the duties at once of the impartial regent
and of the party-chief, he fulfilled neither the one nor the other,
and was regarded by public opinion with justice as a despotic regent,
and by his adherents with equal justice as a leader who either
could not or would not protect his followers.

But, although the republicans were still stirring and were even refreshed
by an isolated success here and there, chiefly through the blunders
of Pompeius, the object which the regents had proposed
to themselves in that dictatorship was on the whole attained,
the reins were drawn tighter, the republican party was humbled,
and the new monarchy was strengthened.  The public began
to reconcile themselves to the latter.  When Pompeius not long after
recovered from a serious illness, his restoration was celebrated
throughout Italy with the accompanying demonstrations of joy
which are usual on such occasions in monarchies.  The regents
showed themselves satisfied; as early as the 1st of August 702
Pompeius resigned his dictatorship, and shared the consulship
with his client Metellus Scipio.




Chapter IX

Death of Crassus--Rupture between the Joint Rulers

Crassus Goes to Syria

Marcus Crassus had for years been reckoned among the heads
of the "three-headed monster," without any proper title
to be so included.  He served as a makeweight to trim the balance
between the real regents Pompeius and Caesar, or, to speak
more accurately, his weight fell into the scale of Caesar
against Pompeius.  This part is not a too reputable one;
but Crassus was never hindered by any keen sense of honour
from pursuing his own advantage.  He was a merchant and was open
to be dealt with.  What was offered to him was not much;
but, when more was not to be got, he accepted it, and sought
to forget the ambition that fretted him, and his chagrin
at occupying a position so near to power and yet so powerless,
amidst his always accumulating piles of gold.  But the conference
at Luca changed the state of matters also for him; with the view
of still retaining the preponderance as compared with Pompeius
after concessions so extensive, Caesar gave to his old confederate
Crassus an opportunity of attaining in Syria through the Parthian war
the same position to which Caesar had attained by the Celtic war
in Gaul.  It was difficult to say whether these new prospects
proved more attractive to the ardent thirst for gold which had now become
at the age of sixty a second nature and grew only the more intense
with every newly-won million, or to the ambition which had been
long repressed with difficulty in the old man's breast
and now glowed in it with restless fire.  He arrived in Syria as early
as the beginning of 700; he had not even waited for the expiry
of his consulship to depart.  Full of impatient ardour he seemed desirous
to redeem every minute with the view of making up for what he had lost,
of gathering in the treasures of the east in addition to those
of the west, of achieving the power and glory of a general
as rapidly as Caesar, and with as little trouble as Pompeius.

Expedition against Parthia Resolved on

He found the Parthian war already commenced.  The faithless conduct
of Pompeius towards the Parthians has been already mentioned;(1)
he had not respected the stipulated frontier of the Euphrates
and had wrested several provinces from the Parthian empire
for the benefit of Armenia, which was now a client state of Rome.
King Phraates had submitted to this treatment; but after he had been
murdered by his two sons Mithradates and Orodes, the new king
Mithradates immediately declared war on the king of Armenia, Artavasdes,
son of the recently deceased Tigranes (about 698).(2)  This was
at the same time a declaration of war against Rome; therefore
as soon as the revolt of the Jews was suppressed, Gabinius,
the able and spirited governor of Syria, led the legions
over the Euphrates.  Meanwhile, however, a revolution had occurred
in the Parthian empire; the grandees of the kingdom, with the young,
bold, and talented grand vizier at their head, had overthrown
king Mithradates and placed his brother Orodes on the throne.
Mithradates therefore made common cause with the Romans
and resorted to the camp of Gabinius.  Everything promised
the best results to the enterprise of the Roman governor,
when he unexpectedly received orders to conduct the king of Egypt
back by force of arms to Alexandria.(3)  He was obliged to obey;
but, in the expectation of soon coming back, he induced the dethroned
Parthian prince who solicited aid from him to commence the war
in the meanwhile at his own hand.  Mithradates did so; and Seleucia
and Babylon declared for him; but the vizier captured Seleucia
by assault, having been in person the first to mount the battlements,
and in Babylon Mithradates himself was forced by famine to surrender,
whereupon he was by his brother's orders put to death.
His death was a palpable loss to the Romans; but it by no means
put an end to the ferment in the Parthian empire, and the Armenian war
continued.  Gabinius, after ending the Egyptian campaign,
was just on the eve of turning to account the still favourable
opportunity and resuming the interrupted Parthian war, when Crassus
arrived in Syria and along with the command took up also the plans
of his predecessor.  Full of high-flown hopes he estimated
the difficulties of the march as slight, and the power of resistance
in the armies of the enemy as yet slighter; he not only spoke
confidently of the subjugation of the Parthians, but was already
in imagination the conqueror of the kingdoms of Bactria and India.

Plan of the Campaign

The new Alexander, however, was in no haste.  Before he carried
into effect these great plans, he found leisure for very tedious
and very lucrative collateral transactions.  The temples of Derceto
at Hierapolis Bambyce and of Jehovah at Jerusalem and other rich shrines
of the Syrian province, were by order of Crassus despoiled
of their treasures; and contingents or, still better, sums of money
instead were levied from all the subjects.  The military operations
of the first summer were limited to an extensive reconnaissance
in Mesopotamia; the Euphrates was crossed, the Parthian satrap
was defeated at Ichnae (on the Belik to the north of Rakkah),
and the neighbouring towns, including the considerable one of Nicephorium
(Rakkah), were occupied, after which the Romans having left garrisons
behind in them returned to Syria.  They had hitherto been in doubt
whether it was more advisable to march to Parthia by the circuitous route
of Armenia or by the direct route through the Mesopotamian desert.
The first route, leading through mountainous regions under the control
of trustworthy allies, commended itself by its greater safety;
king Artavasdes came in person to the Roman headquarters
to advocate this plan of the campaign.  But that reconnaissance
decided in favour of the march through Mesopotamia.  The numerous
and flourishing Greek and half-Greek towns in the regions
along the Euphrates and Tigris, above all the great city
of Seleucia, were altogether averse to the Parthian rule;
all the Greek townships with which the Romans came into contact had now,
like the citizens of Carrhae at an earlier time,(4) practically shown
how ready they were to shake off the intolerable foreign yoke
and to receive the Romans as deliverers, almost as countrymen.
The Arab prince Abgarus, who commanded the desert of Edessa and Carrhae
and thereby the usual route from the Euphrates to the Tigris,
had arrived in the camp of the Romans to assure them in person
of his devotedness.  The Parthians had appeared to be wholly unprepared.

The Euphrates Crossed

Accordingly (701) the Euphrates was crossed (near Biradjik).
To reach the Tigris from this point they had the choice
of two routes; either the army might move downward along the Euphrates
to the latitude of Seleucia where the Euphrates and Tigris
are only a few miles distant from each other; or they might
immediately after crossing take the shortest line to the Tigris
right across the great Mesopotamian desert.  The former route
led directly to the Parthian capital Ctesiphon, which lay opposite
Seleucia on the other bank of the Tigris; several weighty voices
were raised in favour of this route in the Roman council of war;
in particular the quaestor Gaius Cassius pointed to the difficulties
of the march in the desert, and to the suspicious reports arriving
from the Roman garrisons on the left bank of the Euphrates
as to the Parthian warlike preparations.  But in opposition to this
the Arab prince Abgarus announced that the Parthians were employed
in evacuating their western provinces.  They had already packed up
their treasures and put themselves in motion to flee to the Hyrcanians
and Scythians; only through a forced march by the shortest route
was it at all possible still to reach them; but by such a march
the Romans would probably succeed in overtaking and cutting up at least
the rear-guard of the great army under Sillaces and the vizier,
and obtaining enormous spoil.  These reports of the friendly Bedouins
decided the direction of the march; the Roman army, consisting
of seven legions, 4000 cavalry, and 4000 slingers and archers,
turned off from the Euphrates and away into the inhospitable plains
of northern Mesopotamia.

The March in the Desert

Far and wide not an enemy showed himself; only hunger and thirst,
and the endless sandy desert, seemed to keep watch at the gates
of the east.  At length, after many days of toilsome marching, not far
from the first river which the Roman army had to cross,
the Balissus (Belik), the first horsemen of the enemy were descried.
Abgarus with his Arabs was sent out to reconnoitre; the Parthian
squadrons retired up to and over the river and vanished
in the distance, pursued by Abgarus and his followers.  With impatience
the Romans waited for his return and for more exact information.
The general hoped here at length to come upon the constantly
retreating foe; his young and brave son Publius, who had fought
with the greatest distinction in Gaul under Caesar,(5) and had been sent
by the latter at the head of a Celtic squadron of horse to take part
in the Parthian war, was inflamed with a vehement desire
for the fight.  When no tidings came, they resolved to advance
at a venture; the signal for starting was given, the Balissus
was crossed, the army after a brief insufficient rest at noon
was led on without delay at a rapid pace.  Then suddenly the kettledrums
of the Parthians sounded all around; on every side their silken
gold-embroidered banners were seen waving, and their iron helmets
and coats of mail glittering in the blaze of the hot noonday sun;
and by the side of the vizier stood prince Abgarus with his Bedouins.

Roman and Parthian Systems of Warfare

The Romans saw too late the net into which they had allowed themselves
to be ensnared.  With sure glance the vizier had thoroughly seen
both the danger and the means of meeting it.  Nothing could
be accomplished against the Roman infantry of the line
with Oriental infantry; so he had rid himself of it, and by
sending a mass, which was useless in the main field of battle,
under the personal leadership of king Orodes to Armenia,
he had prevented king Artavasdes from allowing the promised
10,000 heavy cavalry to join the army of Crassus, who now painfully
felt the want of them.  On the other hand the vizier met the Roman
tactics, unsurpassed of their kind, with a system entirely different.
His army consisted exclusively of cavalry; the line was formed of the
heavy horsemen armed with long thrusting-lances, and protected, man
and horse, by a coat of mail of metallic plates or a leathern doublet
and by similar greaves; the mass of the troops consisted of mounted
archers.  As compared with these, the Romans were thoroughly inferior
in the corresponding arms both as to number and excellence.  Their
infantry of the line, excellent as they were in close combat, whether
at a short distance with the heavy javelin or in hand-to-hand combat
with the sword, could not compel an army consisting merely of cavalry
to come to an engagement with them; and they found, even when they
did come to a hand-to-hand conflict, an equal if not superior
adversary in the iron-clad hosts of lancers.  As compared with an
army like this Parthian one, the Roman army was at a disadvantage
strategically, because the cavalry commanded the communications;
and at a disadvantage tactically, because every weapon of close
combat must succumb to that which is wielded from a distance,
unless the struggle becomes an individual one, man against man.
The concentrated position, on which the whole Roman method of war
was based, increased the danger in presence of such an attack;
the closer the ranks of the Roman column, the more irresistible
certainly was its onset, but the less also could the missiles
fail to hit their mark.  Under ordinary circumstances,
where towns have to be defended and difficulties of the ground
have to be considered, such tactics operating merely with cavalry
against infantry could never be completely carried out;
but in the Mesopotamian desert, where the army, almost like a ship
on the high seas, neither encountered an obstacle nor met
with a basis for strategic dispositions during many days' march,
this mode of warfare was irresistible for the very reason
that circumstances allowed it to be developed there in all its purity
and therefore in all its power.  There everything combined to put
the foreign infantry at a disadvantage against the native cavalry.
Where the heavy-laden Roman foot-soldier dragged himself toilsomely
through the sand or the steppe, and perished from hunger or still more
from thirst amid the pathless route marked only by water-springs
that were far apart and difficult to find, the Parthian horseman,
accustomed from childhood to sit on his fleet steed or camel,
nay almost to spend his life in the saddle, easily traversed
the desert whose hardships he had long learned how to lighten
or in case of need to endure.  There no rain fell to mitigate
the intolerable heat, and to slacken the bowstrings and leathern thongs
of the enemy's archers and slingers; there amidst the deep sand
at many places ordinary ditches and ramparts could hardly be formed
for the camp.  Imagination can scarcely conceive a situation
in which all the military advantages were more on the one side,
and all the disadvantages more thoroughly on the other.

To the question, under what circumstances this new style
of tactics, the first national system that on its own proper ground
showed itself superior to the Roman, arose among the Parthians,
we unfortunately can only reply by conjectures.  The lancers
and mounted archers were of great antiquity in the east, and already
formed the flower of the armies of Cyrus and Darius; but hitherto
these arms had been employed only as secondary, and essentially
to cover the thoroughly useless Oriental infantry.  The Parthian armies
also by no means differed in this respect from the other Oriental ones;
armies are mentioned, five-sixths of which consisted of infantry.
In the campaign of Crassus, on the other hand, the cavalry
for the first time came forward independently, and this arm
obtained quite a new application and quite a different value.
The irresistible superiority of the Roman infantry in close combat
seems to have led the adversaries of Rome in very different parts
of the world independently of each other--at the same time
and with similar success--to meet it with cavalry and distant weapons.
What as completely successful with Cassivellaunus in Britain(6)
and partially successful with Vercingetorix in Gaul(7)--
what was to a certain degree attempted even by Mithradates Eupator(8)--
the vizier of Orodes carried out only on a larger scale
and more completely.  And in doing so he had special advantages:
for he found in the heavy cavalry the means of forming a line; the bow
which was national in the east and was handled with masterly skill
in the Persian provinces gave him an effective weapon for distant combat;
and lastly the peculiarities of the country and the people
enabled him freely to realize his brilliant idea.  Here, where
the Roman weapons of close combat and the Roman system of concentration
yielded for the first time before the weapons of more distant warfare
and the system of deploying, was initiated that military revolution
which only reached its completion with the introduction of firearms.

Battle near Carrhae

Under such circumstances the first battle between the Romans
and Parthians was fought amidst the sandy desert thirty miles
to the south of Carrhae (Harran) where there was a Roman garrison,
and at a somewhat less distance to the north of Ichnae.  The Roman
archers were sent forward, but retired immediately before the enormous
numerical superiority and the far greater elasticity and range
of the Parthian bows.  The legions, which, in spite of the advice
of the more sagacious officers that they should be deployed
as much as possible against the enemy, had been drawn up
in a dense square of twelve cohorts on each side, were soon outflanked
and overwhelmed with the formidable arrows, which under such circumstances
hit their man even without special aim, and against which the soldiers
had no means of retaliation.  The hope that the enemy might expend
his missiles vanished with a glance at the endless range of camels
laden with arrows.  The Parthians were still extending their line.
That the outflanking might not end in surrounding, Publius Crassus
advanced to the attack with a select corps of cavalry, archers,
and infantry of the line.  The enemy in fact abandoned the attempt
to close the circle, and retreated, hotly pursued by the impetuous
leader of the Romans.  But, when the corps of Publius had totally lost
sight of the main army, the heavy cavalry made a stand against it,
and the Parthian host hastening up from all sides closed in
like a net round it.  Publius, who saw his troops falling thickly
and vainly around him under the arrows of the mounted archers,
threw himself in desperation with his Celtic cavalry unprotected
by any coats of mail on the iron-clad lancers of the enemy;
but the death-despising valour of his Celts, who seized the lances
with their hands or sprang from their horses to stab the enemy,
performed its marvels in vain.  The remains of the corps,
including their leader wounded in the sword-arm, were driven
to a slight eminence, where they only served for an easier mark
to the enemy's archers.  Mesopotamian Greeks, who were accurately
acquainted with the country, adjured Crassus to ride off with them
and make an attempt to escape; but he refused to separate his fate
from that of the brave men whom his too-daring courage
had led to death, and he caused himself to be stabbed by the hand
of his shield-bearer.  Following his example, most of the still
surviving officers put themselves to death.  Of the whole division,
about 6000 strong, not more than 500 were taken prisoners;
no one was able to escape.  Meanwhile the attack on the main army
had slackened, and the Romans were but too glad to rest.
When at length the absence of any tidings from the corps
sent out startled them out of the deceitful calm, and they drew near
to the scene of the battle for the purpose of learning its fate,
the head of the son was displayed on a pole before his father's eyes;
and the terrible onslaught began once more against the main army
with the same fury and the same hopeless uniformity.  They could
neither break the ranks of the lancers nor reach the archers;
night alone put an end to the slaughter.  Had the Parthians bivouacked
on the battle-field, hardly a man of the Roman army would have escaped.
But not trained to fight otherwise than on horseback, and therefore
afraid of a surprise, they were wont never to encamp close to the enemy;
jeeringly they shouted to the Romans that they would give the general
a night to bewail his son, and galloped off to return next morning
and despatch the game that lay bleeding on the ground.

Retreat to Carrhae

Of course the Romans did not wait for the morning.  The lieutenant-
generals Cassius and Octavius--Crassus himself had completely
lost his judgment--ordered the men still capable of marching
to set out immediately and with the utmost silence (while the whole--
said to amount to 4000--of the wounded and stragglers were left),
with the view of seeking protection within the walls of Carrhae.
The fact that the Parthians, when they returned on the following day,
applied themselves first of all to seek out and massacre
the scattered Romans left behind, and the further fact that the garrison
and inhabitants of Carrhae, early informed of the disaster by fugitives,
had marched forth in all haste to meet the beaten army, saved the remnants
of it from what seemed inevitable destruction.

Departure from Carrhae
Surprise at Sinnaca

The squadrons of Parthian horsemen could not think of undertaking
a siege of Carrhae.  But the Romans soon voluntarily departed,
whether compelled by want of provisions, or in consequence
of the desponding precipitation of their commander-in-chief,
whom the soldiers had vainly attempted to remove from the command
and to replace by Cassius.  They moved in the direction of the Armenian
mountains; marching by night and resting by day Octavius with a band
of 5000 men reached the fortress of Sinnaca, which was only
a day's march distant from the heights that would give shelter,
and liberated even at the peril of his own life the commander-in-chief,
whom the guide had led astray and given up to the enemy.
Then the vizier rode in front of the Roman camp to offer,
in the name of his king, peace and friendship to the Romans,
and to propose a personal conference between the two generals.
The Roman army, demoralized as it was, adjured and indeed compelled
its leader to accept the offer.  The vizier received the consular
and his staff with the usual honours, and offered anew to conclude
a compact of friendship; only, with just bitterness recalling the fate
of the agreements concluded with Lucullus and Pompeius respecting
the Euphrates boundary,(9) he demanded that it should be immediately
reduced to writing.  A richly adorned horse was produced;
it was a present from the king to the Roman commander-in-chief;
the servants of the vizier crowded round Crassus, zealous to mount him
on the steed.  It seemed to the Roman officers as if there was a design
to seize the person of the commander-in-chief; Octavius, unarmed
as he was, pulled the sword of one of the Parthians from its sheath
and stabbed the groom.  In the tumult which thereupon arose,
the Roman officers were all put to death; the gray-haired commander-
in-chief also, like his grand-uncle,(10) was unwilling to serve
as a living trophy to the enemy, and sought and found death.
The multitude left behind in the camp without a leader were partly
taken prisoners, partly dispersed.  What the day of Carrhae had begun,
the day of Sinnaca completed (June 9, 701); the two took their place
side by side with the days of the Allia, of Cannae, and of Arausio.
The army of the Euphrates was no more.  Only the squadron
of Gaius Cassius, which had been broken off from the main army
on the retreat from Carrhae, and some other scattered bands
and isolated fugitives succeeded in escaping from the Parthians
and Bedouins and separately finding their way back to Syria.
Of above 40,000 Roman legionaries, who had crossed the Euphrates,
not a fourth part returned; the half had perished; nearly 10,000
Roman prisoners were settled by the victors in the extreme east
of their kingdom--in the oasis of Merv--as bondsmen compelled
after the Parthian fashion to render military service.
For the first time since the eagles had headed the legions,
they had become in the same year trophies of victory in the hands
of foreign nations, almost contemporaneously of a German tribe
in the west(11) and of the Parthians in the east.  As to the impression
which the defeat of the Romans produced in the east, unfortunately
no adequate information has reached us; but it must have been deep
and lasting.  King Orodes was just celebrating the marriage of his son
Pacorus with the sister of his new ally, Artavasdes the king of Armenia,
when the announcement of the victory of his vizier arrived,
and along with it, according to Oriental usage, the cut-off head
of Crassus.  The tables were already removed; one of the wandering
companies of actors from Asia Minor, numbers of which at that time
existed and carried Hellenic poetry and the Hellenic drama
far into the east, was just performing before the assembled court
the -Bacchae- of Euripides.  The actor playing the part of Agave,
who in her Dionysiac frenzy has torn in pieces her son and returns
from Cithaeron carrying his head on the thyrsus, exchanged this
for the bloody head of Crassus, and to the infinite delight of his
audience of half-Hellenized barbarians began afresh the well-known song:

   --pheromin ex oreos
   elika neotomon epi melathra
   makarian theiran--.

It was, since the times of the Achaemenids, the first serious victory
which the Orientals had achieved over the west; and there was
a deep significance in the fact that, by way of celebrating
this victory, the fairest product of the western world--
Greek tragedy--parodied itself through its degenerate representatives
in that hideous burlesque.  The civic spirit of Rome and the genius
of Hellas began simultaneously to accommodate themselves
to the chains of sultanism.

Consequences of the Defeat

The disaster, terrible in itself, seemed also as though
it was to be dreadful in its consequences, and to shake the foundations
of the Roman power in the east.  It was among the least of its results
that the Parthians now had absolute sway beyond the Euphrates;
that Armenia, after having fallen away from the Roman alliance
even before the disaster of Crassus, was reduced by it
into entire dependence on Parthia; that the faithful citizens
of Carrhae were bitterly punished for their adherence to the Occidentals
by the new master appointed over them by the Parthians,
one of the treacherous guides of the Romans, named Andromachus.
The Parthians now prepared in all earnest to cross the Euphrates
in their turn, and, in union with the Armenians and Arabs, to dislodge
the Romans from Syria.  The Jews and various other Occidentals
awaited emancipation from the Roman rule there, no less impatiently
than the Hellenes beyond the Euphrates awaited relief
from the Parthian; in Rome civil war was at the door; an attack
at this particular place and time was a grave peril.  But fortunately
for Rome the leaders on each side had changed.  Sultan Orodes
was too much indebted to the heroic prince, who had first placed
the crown on his head and then cleared the land from the enemy,
not to get rid of him as soon as possible by the executioner.
His place as commander-in-chief of the invading army destined for Syria
was filled by a prince, the king's son Pacorus, with whom on account
of his youth and inexperience the prince Osaces had to be associated
as military adviser.  On the other side the interim command
in Syria in room of Crassus was taken up by the prudent and resolute
quaestor Gaius Cassius.

Repulse of the Parthians

The Parthians were, just like Crassus formerly, in no haste to attack,
but during the years 701 and 702 sent only weak flying bands,
who were easily repulsed, across the Euphrates; so that Cassius
obtained time to reorganize the army in some measure, and with the help
of the faithful adherent of the Romans, Herodes Antipater,
to reduce to obedience the Jews, whom resentment at the spoliation
of the temple perpetrated by Crassus had already driven to arms.
The Roman government would thus have had full time to send
fresh troops for the defence of the threatened frontier;
but this was left undone amidst the convulsions of the incipient
revolution, and, when at length in 703 the great Parthian invading army
appeared on the Euphrates, Cassius had still nothing to oppose to it
but the two weak legions formed from the remains of the army of Crassus.
Of course with these he could neither prevent the crossing
nor defend the province.  Syria was overrun by the Parthians,
and all Western Asia trembled.  But the Parthians did not understand
the besieging of towns.  They not only retreated from Antioch,
into which Cassius had thrown himself with his troops, without having
accomplished their object, but they were on their retreat
along the Orontes allured into an ambush by Cassius' cavalry
and there severely handled by the Roman infantry; prince Osaces
was himself among the slain.  Friend and foe thus perceived
that the Parthian army under an ordinary general and on ordinary ground
was not capable of much more than any other Oriental army.
However, the attack was not abandoned.  Still during the winter
of 703-704 Pacorus lay encamped in Cyrrhestica on this side
of the Euphrates; and the new governor of Syria, Marcus Bibulus,
as wretched a general as he was an incapable statesman,
knew no better course of action than to shut himself up
in his fortresses.  It was generally expected that the war
would break out in 704 with renewed fury. But instead
of turning his arms against the Romans, Pacorus turned against
his own father, and accordingly even entered into an understanding
with the Roman governor.  Thus the stain was not wiped
from the shield of Roman honour, nor was the reputation of Rome
restored in the east; but the Parthian invasion of Western Asia
was over, and the Euphrates boundary was, for the time being
at least, retained.

Impression Produced in Rome by the Defeat of Carrhae

In Rome meanwhile the periodical volcano of revolution was whirling
upward its clouds of stupefying smoke.  The Romans began to have
no longer a soldier or a denarius to be employed against the public foe--
no longer a thought for the destinies of the nations.  It is
one of the most dreadful signs of the times, that the huge national
disaster of Carrhae and Sinnaca gave the politicians of that time
far less to think and speak of than that wretched tumult
on the Appian road, in which, a couple of months after Crassus,
Clodius the partisan-leader perished; but it is easily conceivable
and almost excusable.  The breach between the two regents, long felt
as inevitable and often announced as near, was now assuming
such a shape that it could not be arrested.  Like the boat
of the ancient Greek mariners' tale, the vessel of the Roman community
now found itself as it were between two rocks swimming towards each other;
expecting every moment the crash of collision, those whom it was bearing,
tortured by nameless anguish, into the eddying surge that rose
higher and higher were benumbed; and, while every slightest movement
there attracted a thousand, eyes, no one ventured to give a glance
to the right or the left.

The Good Understanding between the Regents Relaxed

After Caesar had, at the conference of Luca in April 698,
agreed to considerable concessions as regarded Pompeius,
and the regents had thus placed themselves substantially on a level,
their relation was not without the outward conditions of durability,
so far as a division of the monarchical power--in itself indivisible--
could be lasting at all.  It was a different question
whether the regents, at least for the present, were determined
to keep together and mutually to acknowledge without reserve their title
to rank as equals.  That this was the case with Caesar, in so far
as he had acquired the interval necessary for the conquest of Gaul
at the price of equalization with Pompeius, has been already set forth.
But Pompeius was hardly ever, even provisionally, in earnest
with the collegiate scheme.  His was one of those petty
and mean natures, towards which it is dangerous to practise magnanimity;
to his paltry spirit it appeared certainly a dictate of prudence
to supplant at the first opportunity his reluctantly acknowledged rival,
and his mean soul thirsted after a possibility of retaliating on Caesar
for the humiliation which he had suffered through Caesar's indulgence.
But while it is probable that Pompeius in accordance with his dull
and sluggish nature never properly consented to let Caesar
hold a position of equality by his side, yet the design
of breaking up the alliance doubtless came only by degrees
to be distinctly entertained by him.  At any rate the public,
which usually saw better through the views and intentions
of Pompeius than he did himself, could not be mistaken
in thinking that at least with the death of the beautiful Julia--
who died in the bloom of womanhood in the autumn of 700 and was
soon followed by her only child to the tomb--the personal relation
between her father and her husband was broken up.  Caesar attempted
to re-establish the ties of affinity which fate had severed;
he asked for himself the hand of the only daughter of Pompeius,
and offered Octavia, his sister's grand-daughter, who was now
his nearest relative, in marriage to his fellow-regent; but Pompeius
left his daughter to her existing husband Faustus Sulla the son
of the regent, and he himself married the daughter of Quintus Metellus
Scipio.  The personal breach had unmistakeably begun, and it was
Pompeius who drew back his hand.  It was expected that a political
breach would at once follow; but in this people were mistaken;
in public affairs a collegiate understanding continued for a time
to subsist.  The reason was, that Caesar did not wish publicly
to dissolve the relation before the subjugation of Gaul
was accomplished, and Pompeius did not wish to dissolve it
before the governing authorities and Italy should be wholly reduced
under his power by his investiture with the dictatorship.
It is singular, but yet readily admits of explanation, that the regents
under these circumstances supported each other; Pompeius
after the disaster of Aduatuca in the winter of 700 handed over
one of his Italian legions that were dismissed on furlough
by way of loan to Caesar; on the other hand Caesar granted his consent
and his moral support to Pompeius in the repressive measures
which the latter took against the stubborn republican opposition.

Dictatorship of Pompeius
Covert Attacks by Pompeius on Caesar

It was only after Pompeius had in this way procured for himself
at the beginning of 702 the undivided consulship and an influence
in the capital thoroughly outweighing that of Caesar,
and after all the men capable of arms in Italy had tendered
their military oath to himself personally and in his name,
that he formed the resolution to break as soon as possible
formally with Caesar; and the design became distinctly enough apparent.
That the judicial prosecution which took place after the tumult
on the Appian Way lighted with unsparing severity precisely
on the old democratic partisans of Caesar,(12) might perhaps pass
as a mere awkwardness.  That the new law against electioneering intrigues,
which had retrospective effect as far as 684, included also the dubious
proceedings at Caesar's candidature for the consulship,(13)
might likewise be nothing more, although not a few Caesarians thought
that they perceived in it a definite design.  But people
could no longer shut their eyes, however willing they might be
to do so, when Pompeius did not select for his colleague
in the consulship his former father-in-law Caesar, as was fitting
in the circumstances of the case and was in many quarters demanded,
but associated with himself a puppet wholly dependent on him
in his new father-in-law Scipio;(14) and still less, when Pompeius
at the same time got the governorship of the two Spains continued
to him for five years more, that is to 709, and a considerable
fixed sum appropriated from the state-chest for the payment of his troops,
not only without stipulating for a like prolongation of command
and a like grant of money to Caesar, but even while labouring
ulteriorly to effect the recall of Caesar before the term
formerly agreed on through the new regulations which were issued
at the same time regarding the holding of the governorships.
These encroachments were unmistakeably calculated to undermine
Caesar's position and eventually to overthrow him.  The moment
could not be more favourable.  Caesar had conceded so much to Pompeius
at Luca, only because Crassus and his Syrian army would necessarily,
in the event of any rupture with Pompeius, be thrown into Caesar's scale;
for upon Crassus--who since the times of Sulla had been
at the deepest enmity with Pompeius and almost as long politically
and personally allied with Caesar, and who from his peculiar character
at all events, if he could not himself be king of Rome, would have been
content with being the new king's banker--Caesar could always reckon,
and could have no apprehension at all of seeing Crassus confronting him
as an ally of his enemies.  The catastrophe of June 701,
by which army and general in Syria perished, was therefore
a terribly severe blow also for Caesar.  A few months later
the national insurrection blazed up more violently than ever in Gaul,
just when it had seemed completely subdued, and for the first time
Caesar here encountered an equal opponent in the Arvernian king
Vercingetorix.  Once more fate had been working for Pompeius;
Crassus was dead, all Gaul was in revolt, Pompeius was practically
dictator of Rome and master of the senate.  What might have happened,
if he had now, instead of remotely intriguing against Caesar,
summarily compelled the burgesses or the senate to recall Caesar
at once from Gaul!  But Pompeius never understood how to take advantage
of fortune.  He heralded the breach clearly enough; already in 702
his acts left no doubt about it, and in the spring of 703 he openly
expressed his purpose of breaking with Caesar; but he did not
break with him, and allowed the months to slip away unemployed.

The Old Party Names and the Pretenders

But however Pompeius might delay, the crisis was incessantly urged
on by the mere force of circumstances.

The impending war was not a struggle possibly between republic
and monarchy--for that had been virtually decided years before--
but a struggle between Pompeius and Caesar for the possession
of the crown of Rome.  But neither of the pretenders found his account
in uttering the plain truth; he would have thereby driven
all that very respectable portion of the burgesses, which desired
the continuance of the republic and believed in its possibility,
directly into the camp of his opponent.  The old battle-cries raised
by Gracchus and Drusus, Cinna and Sulla, used up and meaningless
as they were, remained still good enough for watchwords
in the struggle of the two generals contending for the sole rule;
and, though for the moment both Pompeius and Caesar ranked themselves
officially with the so-called popular party, it could not be
for a moment doubtful that Caesar would inscribe on his banner
the people and democratic progress, Pompeius the aristocracy
and the legitimate constitution.

The Democracy and Caesar

Caesar had no choice.  He was from the outset and very earnestly
a democrat; the monarchy as he understood it differed more outwardly
than in reality from the Gracchan government of the people;
and he was too magnanimous and too profound a statesman to conceal
his colours and to fight under any other escutcheon than his own.
The immediate advantage no doubt, which this battle-cry brought to him,
was trifling; it was confined mainly to the circumstance
that he was thereby relieved from the inconvenience of directly naming
the kingly office, and so alarming the mass of the lukewarm
and his own adherents by that detested word.  The democratic banner
hardly yielded farther positive gain, since the ideals of Gracchus
had been rendered infamous and ridiculous by Clodius;
for where was there now--laying aside perhaps the Transpadanes--
any class of any sort of importance, which would have been induced
by the battle-cries of the democracy to take part in the struggle?

The Aristocracy and Pompeius

This state of things would have decided the part of Pompeius
in the impending struggle, even if apart from this it had not been
self-evident that he could only enter into it as the general
of the legitimate republic.  Nature had destined him, if ever any one,
to be a member of an aristocracy; and nothing but very accidental
and very selfish motives had carried him over as a deserter
from the aristocratic to the democratic camp.  That he should now
revert to his Sullan traditions, was not merely befitting in the case,
but in every respect of essential advantage.  Effete as was
the democratic cry, the conservative cry could not but have
the more potent effect, if it proceeded from the right man.
Perhaps the majority, at any rate the flower of the burgesses,
belonged to the constitutional party; and as respected its numerical
and moral strength might well be called to interfere powerfully,
perhaps decisively, in the impending struggle of the pretenders.
It wanted nothing but a leader.  Marcus Cato, its present head,
did the duty, as he understood it, of its leader amidst daily peril
to his life and perhaps without hope of success; his fidelity to duty
deserves respect, but to be the last at a forlorn post is commendable
in the soldier, not in the general.  He had not the skill
either to organize or to bring into action at the proper time
the powerful reserve, which had sprung up as it were spontaneously
in Italy for the party of the overthrown government; and he had
for good reasons never made any pretension to the military leadership,
on which everything ultimately depended.  If instead of this man,
who knew not how to act either as party-chief or as general,
a man of the political and military mark of Pompeius should raise
the banner of the existing constitution, the municipals of Italy
would necessarily flock towards it in crowds, that under it
they might help to fight, if not indeed for the kingship of Pompeius,
at any rate against the kingship of Caesar.

To this was added another consideration at least as important.
It was characteristic of Pompeius, even when he had formed a resolve,
not to be able to find his way to its execution.  While he knew
perhaps how to conduct war but certainly not how to declare it,
the Catonian party, although assuredly unable to conduct it,
was very able and above all very ready to supply grounds for the war
against the monarchy on the point of being founded.  According to
the intention of Pompeius, while he kept himself aloof, and in his
peculiar way, now talked as though he would immediately depart
for his Spanish provinces, now made preparations as though he would
set out to take over the command on the Euphrates, the legitimate
governing board, namely the senate, were to break with Caesar,
to declare war against him, and to entrust the conduct of it to Pompeius,
who then, yielding to the general desire, was to come forward
as the protector of the constitution against demagogico-
monarchical plots, as an upright man and champion of the existing
order of things against the profligates and anarchists,
as the duly-installed general of the senate against the Imperator
of the street, and so once more to save his country.  Thus Pompeius
gained by the alliance with the conservatives both a second army
in addition to his personal adherents, and a suitable war-manifesto--
advantages which certainly were purchased at the high price
of coalescing with those who were in principle opposed to him.
Of the countless evils involved in this coalition, there was developed
in the meantime only one--but that already a very grave one--
that Pompeius surrendered the power of commencing hostilities
against Caesar when and how he pleased, and in this decisive point
made himself dependent on all the accidents and caprices
of an aristocratic corporation.

The Republicans

Thus the republican opposition, after having been for years
obliged to rest content with the part of a mere spectator
and having hardly ventured to whisper, was now brought back once more
to the political stage by the impending rupture between the regents.
It consisted primarily of the circle which rallied round Cato--
those republicans who were resolved to venture on the struggle
for the republic and against the monarchy under all circumstances,
and the sooner the better.  The pitiful issue of the attempt
made in 698(15) had taught them that they by themselves alone
were not in a position either to conduct war or even to call it forth;
it was known to every one that even in the senate, while the whole
corporation with a few isolated exceptions was averse to monarchy,
the majority would still only restore the oligarchic government
if it might be restored without danger--in which case, doubtless,
it had a good while to wait.  In presence of the regents on the one hand,
and on the other hand of this indolent majority, which desired peace
above all things and at any price, and was averse to any decided action
and most of all to a decided rupture with one or other of the regents,
the only possible course for the Catonian party to obtain a restoration
of the old rule lay in a coalition with the less dangerous
of the rulers.  If Pompeius acknowledged the oligarchic constitution
and offered to fight for it against Caesar, the republican opposition
might and must recognize him as its general, and in alliance
with him compel the timid majority to a declaration of war.
That Pompeius was not quite in earnest with his fidelity
to the constitution, could indeed escape nobody; but, undecided
as he was in everything, he had by no means arrived like Caesar
at a clear and firm conviction that it must be the first business
of the new monarch to sweep off thoroughly and conclusively
the oligarchic lumber.  At any rate the war would train
a really republican army and really republican generals;
and, after the victory over Caesar, they might proceed
with more favourable prospects to set aside not merely
oneof the monarchs, but the monarchy itself, which was in the course
of formation.  Desperate as was the cause of the oligarchy, the offer
of Pompeius to become its ally was the most favourable arrangement
possible for it.

Their League with Pompeius

The conclusion of the alliance between Pompeius and the Catonian party
was effected with comparative rapidity.  Already during the dictatorship
of Pompeius a remarkable approximation had taken place between them.
The whole behaviour of Pompeius in the Milonian crisis,
his abrupt repulse of the mob that offered him the dictatorship,
his distinct declaration that he would accept this office
only from the senate, his unrelenting severity against disturbers
of the peace of every sort and especially against the ultra-democrats,
the surprising complaisance with which he treated Cato
and those who shared his views, appeared as much calculated to gain
the men of order as they were offensive to the democrat Caesar.
On the other hand Cato and his followers, instead of combating
with their wonted sternness the proposal to confer the dictatorship
on Pompeius, had made it with immaterial alterations of form
their own; Pompeius had received the undivided consulship
primarily from the hands of Bibulus and Cato.  While the Catonian party
and Pompeius had thus at least a tacit understanding as early
as the beginning of 702, the alliance might be held as formally
concluded, when at the consular elections for 703 there was elected
not Cato himself indeed, but--along with an insignificant man
belonging to the majority of the senate--one of the most decided
adherents of Cato, Marcus Claudius Marcellus.  Marcellus was
no furious zealot and still less a genius, but a steadfast
and strict aristocrat, just the right man to declare war
if war was to be begun with Caesar.  As the case stood,
this election, so surprising after the repressive measures
adopted immediately before against the republican opposition,
can hardly have occurred otherwise than with the consent,
or at least under the tacit permission, of the regent of Rome
for the time being.  Slowly and clumsily, as was his wont,
but steadily Pompeius moved onward to the rupture.

Passive Resistance of Caesar

It was not the intention of Caesar on the other hand to fall out
at this moment with Pompeius.  He could not indeed desire seriously
and permanently to share the ruling power with any colleague,
least of all with one of so secondary a sort as was Pompeius;
and beyond doubt he had long resolved after terminating the conquest
of Gaul to take the sole power for himself, and in case of need to extort
it by force of arms.  But a man like Caesar, in whom the officer
was thoroughly subordinate to the statesman, could not fail
to perceive that the regulation of the political organism
by force of arms does in its consequences deeply and often permanently
disorganize it; and therefore he could not but seek to solve
the difficulty, if at all possible, by peaceful means or at least
without open civil war.  But even if civil war was not to be avoided,
he could not desire to be driven to it at a time, when in Gaul
the rising of Vercingetorix imperilled afresh all that had been obtained
and occupied him without interruption from the winter of 701-702
to the winter of 702-703, and when Pompeius and the constitutional party
opposed to him on principle were dominant in Italy. Accordingly
he sought to preserve the relation with Pompeius and thereby
the peace unbroken, and to attain, if at all possible,
by peaceful means to the consulship for 706 already assured
to him at Luca.  If he should then after a conclusive settlement
of Celtic affairs be placed in a regular manner at the head
of the state, he, who was still more decidedly superior
to Pompeius as a statesman than as a general, might well reckon
on outmanoeuvring the latter in the senate-house and in the Forum
without special difficulty.  Perhaps it was possible to find out
for his awkward, vacillating, and arrogant rival some sort
of honourable and influential position, in which the latter might be
content to sink into a nullity; the repeated attempts of Caesar
to keep himself related by marriage to Pompeius, may have been
designed to pave the way for such a solution and to bring about
a final settlement of the old quarrel through the succession
of offspring inheriting the blood of both competitors.  The republican
opposition would then remain without a leader and therefore
probably quiet, and peace would be preserved.  If this should not
be successful, and if there should be, as was certainly possible,
a necessity for ultimately resorting to the decision of arms,
Caesar would then as consul in Rome dispose of the compliant majority
of the senate; and he could impede or perhaps frustrate the coalition
of the Pompeians and the republicans, and conduct the war
far more suitably and more advantageously, than if he now as proconsul
of Gaul gave orders to march against the senate and its general.
Certainly the success of this plan depended on Pompeius being good-
natured enough to let Caesar still obtain the consulship for 706
assured to him at Luca; but, even if it failed, it would be always
of advantage for Caesar to have given practical and repeated
evidence of the most yielding disposition.  On the one hand time
would thus be gained for attaining his object meanwhile in Gaul;
on the other hand his opponents would be left with the odium
of initiating the rupture and consequently the civil war--
which was of the utmost moment for Caesar with reference to the majority
of the senate and the party of material interests, and more especially
with reference to his own soldiers.

On these views he acted.  He armed certainly; the number of his legion
was raised through new levies in the winter of 702-703 to eleven,
including that borrowed from Pompeius. But at the same time
he expressly and openly approved of Pompeius' conduct during
the dictatorship and the restoration of order in the capital
which he had effected, rejected the warnings of officious friends
as calumnies, reckoned every day by which he succeeded
in postponing the catastrophe a gain, overlooked whatever
could be overlooked and bore whatever could be borne--
immoveably adhering only to the one decisive demand that,
when his governorship of Gaul came to an end with 705,
the second consulship, admissible by republican state-law
and promised to him according to agreement by his colleague,
should be granted to him for the year 706.

Preparation for Attacks on Caesar

This very demand became the battle-field of the diplomatic war
which now began.  If Caesar were compelled either to resign
his office of governor before the last day of December 705,
or to postpone the assumption of the magistracy in the capital
beyond the 1st January 706, so that he should remain for a time
between the governorship and the consulate without office,
and consequently liable to criminal impeachment--which according
to Roman law was only allowable against one who was not in office--
the public had good reason to prophesy for him in this case
the fate of Milo, because Cato had for long been ready to impeach him
and Pompeius was a more than doubtful protector.

Attempt to Keep Caesar Out of the Consulship

Now, to attain that object, Caesar's opponents had a very simple means.
According to the existing ordinance as to elections, every candidate
for the consulship was obliged to announce himself personally
to the presiding magistrate, and to cause his name to be inscribed
on the official list of candidates before the election,
that is half a year before entering on office.  It had probably
been regarded in the conferences at Luca as a matter of course
that Caesar would be released from this obligation, which was
purely formal and was very often dispensed with; but the decree
to that effect had not yet been issued, and, as Pompeius was now
in possession of the decretive machinery, Caesar depended in this respect
on the good will of his rival.  Pompeius incomprehensibly abandoned
of his own accord this completely secure position; with his consen
and during his dictatorship (702) the personal appearance
of Caesar was dispensed with by a tribunician law.  When however
soon afterwards the new election-ordinance(16) was issued,
the obligation of candidates personally to enrol themselves
was repeated in general terms, and no sort of exception was added
in favour of those released from it by earlier resolutions
of the people; according to strict form the privilege granted in favour
of Caesar was cancelled by the later general law.  Caesar complained,
and the clause was subsequently appended but not confirmed
by special decree of the people, so that this enactment inserted
by mere interpolation in the already promulgated law could only be
looked on de jure as a nullity.  Where Pompeius, therefore,
might have simply kept by the law, he had preferred first
to make a spontaneous concession, then to recall it,
and lastly to cloak this recall in a manner most disloyal.

Attempt to Shorten Caesar's Governorship

While in this way the shortening of Caesar's governorship
was only aimed at indirectly, the regulations issued at the same time
as to the governorships sought the same object directly.
The ten years for which the governorship had been secured to Caesar,
in the last instance through the law proposed by Pompeius himself
in concert with Crassus, ran according to the usual mode of reckoning
from 1 March 695 to the last day of February 705.  As, however,
according to the earlier practice, the proconsul or propraetor
had the right of entering on his provincial magistracy immediately
after the termination of his consulship or praetorship, the successor
of Caesar was to be nominated, not from the urban magistrates of 704,
but from those of 705, and could not therefore enter before 1st Jan. 706.
So far Caesar had still during the last ten months of the year 705
a right to the command, not on the ground of the Pompeio-Licinian law,
but on the ground of the old rule that a command with a set term
still continued after the expiry of the term up to the arrival
of the successor.  But now, since the new regulation of 702
called to the governorships not the consuls and praetors
going out, but those who had gone out five years ago or more,
and thus prescribed an interval between the civil magistracy
and the command instead of the previous immediate sequence,
there was no longer any difficulty in straightway filling up
from another quarter every legally vacant governorship, and so,
in the case in question, bringing about for the Gallic provinces
the change of command on the 1st March 705, instead of the 1st Jan. 706.
The pitiful dissimulation and procrastinating artifice of Pompeius
are after a remarkable manner mixed up, in these arrangements,
with the wily formalism and the constitutional erudition
of the republican party.  Years before these weapons of state-law
could be employed, they had them duly prepared, and put themselves
in a condition on the one hand to compel Caesar to the resignation
of his command from the day when the term secured to him by Pompeius'
own law expired, that is from the 1st March 705, by sending successors
to him, and on the other hand to be able to treat as null and void
the votes tendered for him at the elections for 706.  Caesar,
not in a position to hinder these moves in the game, kept silence
and left things to their own course.

Debates as to Caesar's Recall

Gradually therefore the slow course of constitutional procedure
developed itself.  According to custom the senate had to deliberate
on the governorships of the year 705, so far as they went
to former consuls, at the beginning of 703, so far as they went
to former praetors, at the beginning of 704; that earlier deliberation
gave the first occasion to discuss the nomination of new governors
for the two Gauls in the senate, and thereby the first occasion
for open collision between the constitutional party pushed forward
by Pompeius and the senatorial supporters of Caesar.  The consul
Marcus Marcellus introduced a proposal to give the two provinces
hitherto administered by the proconsul Gaius Caesar
from the 1st March 705 to the two consulars who were to be provided
with governorships for that year.  The long-repressed indignation
burst forth in a torrent through the sluice once opened;
everything that the Catonians were meditating against Caesar
was brought forward in these discussions.  For them it was
a settled point, that the right granted by exceptional law
to the proconsul Caesar of announcing his candidature for the consulship
in absence had been again cancelled by a subsequent decree of the people,
and that the reservation inserted in the latter was invalid.
The senate should in their opinion cause this magistrate,
now that the subjugation of Gaul was ended, to discharge immediately
the soldiers who had served out their time.  The cases in which
Caesar had bestowed burgess-rights and established colonies
in Upper Italy were described by them as unconstitutional and null;
in further illustration of which Marcellus ordained that a respected
senator of the Caesarian colony of Comum, who, even if that place
had not burgess but only Latin rights, was entitled to lay claim
to Roman citizenship,(17) should receive the punishment
of scourging, which was admissible only in the case of non-burgesses.

The supporters of Caesar at this time--among whom Gaius Vibius Pansa,
who was the son of a man proscribed by Sulla but yet had entered
on a political career, formerly an officer in Caesar's army
and in this year tribune of the people, was the most notable--
affirmed in the senate that both the state of things in Gaul
and equity demanded not only that Caesar should not be recalled
before the time, but that he should be allowed to retain the command
along with the consulship; and they pointed beyond doubt to the facts,
that a few years previously Pompeius had just in the same way
combined the Spanish governorships with the consulate,
that even at the present time, besides the important office
of superintending the supply of food to the capital, he held
the supreme command in Italy in addition to the Spanish,
and that in fact the whole men capable of arms had been sworn in by him
and had not yet been released from their oath.

The process began to take shape, but its course was not on that account
more rapid.  The majority of the senate, seeing the breach approaching,
allowed no sitting capable of issuing a decree to take place for months;
and other months in their turn were lost over the solemn procrastination
of Pompeius.  At length the latter broke the silence and ranged himself,
in a reserved and vacillating fashion as usual but yet plainly enough,
on the side of the constitutional party against his former ally.
He summarily and abruptly rejected the demand of the Caesarians
that their master should be allowed to conjoin the consulship
and the proconsulship; this demand, he added with blunt coarseness,
seemed to him no better than if a son should offer to flog
his father.  He approved in principle the proposal of Marcellus,
in so far as he too declared that he would not allow Caesar
directly to attach the consulship to the pro-consulship.
He hinted, however, although without making any binding declaration
on the point, that they would perhaps grant to Caesar admission
to the elections for 706 without requiring his personal announcement,
as well as the continuance of his governorship at the utmost
to the 13th Nov. 705.  But in the meantime the incorrigible
procrastinator consented to the postponement of the nomination
of successors to the last day of Feb. 704, which was asked
by the representatives of Caesar, probably on the ground of a clause
of the Pompeio-Licinian law forbidding any discussion in the senate
as to the nomination of successors before the beginning of Caesar's
last year of office.

In this sense accordingly the decrees of the senate were issued
(29 Sept. 703).  The filling up of the Gallic governorships
was placed in the order of the day for the 1st March 704; but even now
it was attempted to break up the army of Caesar--just as had formerly
been done by decree of the people with the army of Lucullus(18)--
by inducing his veterans to apply to the senate for their discharge.
Caesar's supporters effected, indeed, as far as they constitutionally
could, the cancelling of these decrees by their tribunician veto;
but Pompeius very distinctly declared that the magistrates were bound
unconditionally to obey the senate, and that intercessions and similar
antiquated formalities would produce no change.  The oligarchical party,
whose organ Pompeius now made himself, betrayed not obscurely the design,
in the event of a victory, of revising the constitution in their sense
and removing everything which had even the semblance of popular freedom;
as indeed, doubtless for this reason, it omitted to avail itself
of the comitia at all in its attacks directed against Caesar.
The coalition between Pompeius and the constitutional party
was thus formally declared; sentence too was already evidently passed
on Caesar, and the term of its promulgation was simply postponed.
The elections for the following year proved thoroughly adverse to him.

Counter-Arrangements of Caesar

During these party manoeuvres of his antagonists preparatory to war,
Caesar had succeeded in getting rid of the Gallic insurrection
and restoring the state of peace in the whole subject territory.
As early as the summer of 703, under the convenient pretext
of defending the frontier(19) but evidently in token of the fact
that the legions in Gaul were now beginning to be no longer
needed there, he moved one of them to North Italy.  He could not avoid
perceiving now at any rate, if not earlier, that he would not
be spared the necessity of drawing the sword against his fellow-
citizens; nevertheless, as it was highly desirable to leave the legions
still for a time in the barely pacified Gaul, he sought even yet
to procrastinate, and, well acquainted with the extreme
love of peace in the majority of the senate, did not abandon
the hope of still restraining them from the declaration of war
in spite of the pressure exercised over them by Pompeius.
He did not even hesitate to make great sacrifices, if only he might
avoid for the present open variance with the supreme governing board.
When the senate (in the spring of 704) at the suggestion of Pompeius
requested both him and Caesar to furnish each a legion
for the impending Parthian war(20) and when agreeably to this resolution
Pompeius demanded back from Caesar the legion lent to him
some years before, so as to send it to Syria, Caesar complied with
the double demand, because neither the opportuneness of this decree
of the senate nor the justice of the demand of Pompeius
could in themselves be disputed, and the keeping within the bounds
of the law and of formal loyalty was of more consequence to Caesar
than a few thousand soldiers.  The two legions came without delay
and placed themselves at the disposal of the government, but instead
of sending them to the Euphrates, the latter kept them at Capua
in readiness for Pompeius; and the public had once more the opportunity
of comparing the manifest endeavours of Caesar to avoid a rupture
with the perfidious preparation for war by his opponents.

Curio

For the discussions with the senate Caesar had succeeded
in purchasing not only one of the two consuls of the year,
Lucius Aemilius Paullus, but above all the tribune of the people
Gaius Curio, probably the most eminent among the many profligate men
of parts in this epoch;(21) unsurpassed in refined elegance, in fluent
and clever oratory, in dexterity of intrigue, and in that energy
which in the case of vigorous but vicious characters bestirs itself
only the more powerfully amid the pauses of idleness; but also
unsurpassed in his dissolute life, in his talent for borrowing--
his debts were estimated at 60,000,000 sesterces (600,000 pounds)--
and in his moral and political want of principle.  He had previously
offered himself to be bought by Caesar and had been rejected;
the talent, which he thenceforward displayed in his attacks on Caesar,
induced the latter subsequently to buy him up--the price was high,
but the commodity was worth the money.

Debates as to the Recall of Caesar and Pompeius

Curio had in the first months of his tribunate of the people
played the independent republican, and had as such thundered
both against Caesar and against Pompeius.  He availed himself
with rare skill of the apparently impartial position which
this gave him, when in March 704 the proposal as to the filling up
of the Gallic governorships for the next year came up afresh
for discussion in the senate; he completely approved the decree,
but asked that it should be at the same time extended to Pompeius
and his extraordinary commands.  His arguments--that a constitutional
state of things could only be brought about by the removal
of all exceptional positions, that Pompeius as merely entrusted
by the senate with the proconsulship could still less than Caesar
refuse obedience to it, that the one-sided removal of one
of the two generals would only increase the danger to the constitution--
carried complete conviction to superficial politicians and to the public
at large; and the declaration of Curio, that he intended to prevent
any onesided proceedings against Caesar by the veto constitutionally
belonging to him, met with much approval in and out of the senate.
Caesar declared his consent at once to Curio's proposal
and offered to resign his governorship and command at any moment
on the summons of the senate, provided Pompeius would do the same;
he might safely do so, for Pompeius without his Italo-Spanish command
was no longer formidable.  Pompeius again for that very reason
could not avoid refusing; his reply--that Caesar must first resign,
and that he meant speedily to follow the example thus set--
was the less satisfactory, that he did not even specify
a definite term for his retirement.  Again the decision was delayed
for months; Pompeius and the Catonians, perceiving the dubious humour
of the majority of the senate, did not venture to bring Curio's
proposal to a vote.  Caesar employed the summer in establishing
the state of peace in the regions which he had conquered, in holding
a great review of his troops on the Scheldt, and in making
a triumphal march through the province of North Italy, which was
entirely devoted to him; autumn found him in Ravenna, the southern
frontier-town of his province.

Caesar and Pompeius Both Recalled

The vote which could no longer be delayed on Curio's proposal
at length took place, and exhibited the defeat of the party
of Pompeius and Cato in all its extent.  By 370 votes against 20
the senate resolved that the proconsuls of Spain and Gaul
should both be called upon to resign their offices; and with boundless
joy the good burgesses of Rome heard the glad news of the saving
achievement of Curio.  Pompeius was thus recalled by the senate
no less than Caesar, and while Caesar was ready to comply with
the command, Pompeius positively refused obedience.  The presiding
consul Gaius Marcellus, cousin of Marcus Marcellus and like the latter
belonging to the Catonian party, addressed a severe lecture
to the servile majority; and it was, no doubt, vexatious
to be thus beaten in their own camp and beaten by means of a phalanx
of poltroons.  But where was victory to come from under a leader,
who, instead of shortly and distinctly dictating his orders
to the senators, resorted in his old days a second time
to the instructions of a professor of rhetoric, that with eloquence
polished up afresh he might encounter the youthful vigour
and brilliant talents of Curio?

Declaration of War

The coalition, defeated in the senate, was in the most painful position.
The Catonian section had undertaken to push matters to a rupture
and to carry the senate along with them, and now saw their vessel
stranded after a most vexatious manner on the sandbanks of the indolent
majority.  Their leaders had to listen in their conferences
to the bitterest reproaches from Pompeius; he pointed out
emphatically and with entire justice the dangers of the seeming peace;
and, though it depended on himself alone to cut the knot
by rapid action, his allies knew very well that they could never expect
this from him, and that it was for them, as they had promised,
to bring matters to a crisis.  After the champions of the constitution
and of senatorial government had already declared the constitutional
rights of the burgesses and of the tribunes of the people
to be meaningless formalities,(22) they now found themselves
driven by necessity to treat the constitutional decision; of the senate
itself in a similar manner and, as the legitimate government
would not let itself be saved with its own consent, to save it
against its will.  This was neither new nor accidental; Sulla(23)
and Lucullus(24) had been obliged to carry every energetic
resolution conceived by them in the true interest of the government
with a high hand irrespective of it, just as Cato and his friends
now proposed to do; the machinery of the constitution was in fact
utterly effete, and the senate was now--as the comitia had been
for centuries--nothing but a worn-out wheel slipping constantly
out of its track.

It was rumoured (Oct. 704) that Caesar had moved four legions
from Transalpine into Cisalpine Gaul and stationed them at Placentia.
This transference of troops was of itself within the prerogative
of the governor; Curio moreover palpably showed in the senate
the utter groundlessness of the rumour; and they by a majority
rejected the proposal of the consul Gaius Marcellus to give
Pompeius on the strength of it orders to march against Caesar.
Yet the said consul, in concert with the two consuls elected for 705
who likewise belonged to the Catonian party, proceeded to Pompeius,
and these three men by virtue of their own plenitude of power
requested the general to put himself at the head of the two legions
stationed at Capua, and to call the Italian militia to arms
at his discretion.  A more informal authorization for the commencement
of a civil war can hardly be conceived; but people had no longer time
to attend to such secondary matters; Pompeius accepted it.
The military preparations, the levies began; in order personally
to forward them, Pompeius left the capital in December 704.

The Ultimatum of Caesar

Caesar had completely attained the object of devolving
the initiative of civil war on his opponents.  He had, while himself
keeping on legal ground, compelled Pompeius to declare war,
and to declare it not as representative of the legitimate authority,
but as general of an openly revolutionary minority of the senate
which overawed the majority.  This result was not to be reckoned
of slight importance, although the instinct of the masses could not
and did not deceive itself for a moment as to the fact that the war
concerned other things than questions of formal law.  Now, when war
was declared, it was Caesar's interest to strike a blow as soon
as possible.  The preparations of his opponents were just beginning
and even the capital was not occupied.  In ten or twelve days
an army three times as strong as the troops of Caesar
that were in Upper Italy could be collected at Rome; but still
it was not impossible to surprise the city undefended, or even perhaps
by a rapid winter campaign to seize all Italy, and to shut off
the best resources of his opponents before they could make them available.
The sagacious and energetic Curio, who after resigning his tribunate
(10 Dec. 704) had immediately gone to Caesar at Ravenna,
vividly represented the state of things to his master;
and it hardly needed such a representation to convince Caesar
that longer delay now could only be injurious.  But, as he with the view
of not giving his antagonists occasion to complain had hitherto
brought no troops to Ravenna itself, he could for the present do nothing
but despatch orders to his whole force to set out with all haste;
and he had to wait till at least the one legion stationed in Upper Italy
reached Ravenna.  Meanwhile he sent an ultimatum to Rome,
which, if useful for nothing else, by its extreme submissiveness
still farther compromised his opponents in public opinion,
and perhaps even, as he seemed himself to hesitate, induced them
to prosecute more remissly their preparations against him.
In this ultimatum Caesar dropped all the counter-demands
which he formerly made on Pompeius, and offered on his own part
both to resign the governorship of Transalpine Gaul, and to dismiss
eight of the ten legions belonging to him, at the term fixed
by the senate; he declared himself content, if the senate would leave him
either the governorship of Cisalpine Gaul and Illyria with one,
or that of Cisalpine Gaul alone with two, legions, not, forsooth,
up to his investiture with the consulship, but till after the close
of the consular elections for 706.  He thus consented to those proposals
of accommodation, with which at the beginning of the discussions
the senatorial party and even Pompeius himself had declared
that they would be satisfied, and showed himself ready to remain
in a private position from his election to the consulate down to
his entering on office.  Whether Caesar was in earnest with these
astonishing concessions and had confidence that he should be able
to carry through his game against Pompeius even after granting
so much, or whether he reckoned that those on the other side
had already gone too far to find in these proposals of compromise
more than a proof that Caesar regarded his cause itself as lost,
can no longer be with certainty determined.  The probability is,
that Caesar committed the fault of playing a too bold game, far worse
rather than the fault of promising something which he was not minded
to perform; and that, if strangely enough his proposals had been
accepted, he would have made good his word.

Last Debate in the Senate

Curio undertook once more to represent his master in the lion's den.
In three days he made the journey from Ravenna to Rome.
When the new consuls Lucius Lentulus and Gaius Marcellus the younger(25)
assembled the senate for the first time on 1 Jan. 705, he delivered
in a full meeting the letter addressed by the general to the senate.
The tribunes of the people, Marcus Antonius well known
in the chronicle of scandal of the city as the intimate friend
of Curio and his accomplice in all his follies, but at the same time
known from the Egyptian and Gallic campaigns as a brilliant cavalry
officer, and Quintus Cassius, Pompeius' former quaestor,--the two,
who were now in Curio's stead managing the cause of Caesar in Rome--
insisted on the immediate reading of the despatch.  The grave
and clear words in which Caesar set forth the imminence of civil war,
the general wish for peace, the arrogance of Pompeius, and his own
yielding disposition, with all the irresistible force of truth;
the proposals for a compromise, of a moderation which doubtless
surprised his own partisans; the distinct declaration that this was
the last time that he should offer his hand for peace--
made the deepest impression.  In spite of the dread inspired
by the numerous soldiers of Pompeius who flocked into the capital,
the sentiment of the majority was not doubtful; the consuls could not
venture to let it find expression.  Respecting the proposal renewed
by Caesar that both generals might be enjoined to resign their commands
simultaneously, respecting all the projects of accommodation
suggested by his letter, and respecting the proposal made
by Marcus Coelius Rufus and Marcus Calidius that Pompeius
should be urged immediately to depart for Spain, the consuls refused--
as they in the capacity of presiding officers were entitled to do--
to let a vote take place.  Even the proposal of one of their
most decided partisans who was simply not so blind to the military
position of affairs as his party, Marcus Marcellus--to defer
the determination till the Italian levy en masse could be under arms
and could protect the senate--was not allowed to be brought to a vote.
Pompeius caused it to be declared through his usual organ,
Quintus Scipio, that he was resolved to take up the cause of the senate
now or never, and that he would let it drop if they longer delayed.
The consul Lentulus said in plain terms that even the decree
of the senate was no longer of consequence, and that, if it
should persevere in its servility, he would act of himself
and with his powerful friends take the farther steps necessary.
Thus overawed, the majority decreed what was commanded--
that Caesar should at a definite and not distant day give up
Transalpine Gaul to Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus, and Cisalpine Gaul
to Marcus Servilius Nonianus, and should dismiss his army,
failing which he should be esteemed a traitor.  When the tribunes
of Caesar's party made use of their right of veto against this resolution,
not only were they, as they at least asserted, threatened
in the senate-house itself by the swords of Pompeian soldiers,
and forced, in order to save their lives, to flee in slaves'
clothing from the capital; but the now sufficiently overawed senate
treated their formally quite constitutional interference
as an attempt at revolution, declared the country in danger,
and in the usual forms called the whole burgesses to take up arms,
and all magistrates faithful to the constitution to place themselves
at the head of the armed (7 Jan. 705).

Caesar Marches into Italy

Now it was enough.  When Caesar was informed by the tribunes
who had fled to his camp entreating protection as to the reception
which his proposals had met with in the capital, he called together
the soldiers of the thirteenth legion, which had meanwhile arrived
from its cantonments near Tergeste (Trieste) at Ravenna,
and unfolded before them the state of things.  It was not merely
the man of genius versed in the knowledge and skilled in the control
of men's hearts, whose brilliant eloquence shone forth and glowed
in this agitating crisis of his own and the world's destiny;
nor merely the generous commander-in-chief and the victorious general,
addressing soldiers, who had been called by himself to arms
and for eight years had followed his banners with daily-increasing
enthusiasm.  There spoke, above all, the energetic and consistent
statesman, who had now for nine-and-twenty years defended
the cause of freedom in good and evil times; who had braved for it
the daggers of assassins and the executioners of the aristocracy,
the swords of the Germans and the waves of the unknown ocean,
without ever yielding or wavering; who had torn to pieces
the Sullan constitution, had overthrown the rule of the senate,
and had furnished the defenceless and unarmed democracy with protection
and with arms by means of the struggle beyond the Alps. And he spoke,
not to the Clodian public whose republican enthusiasm had been
long burnt down to ashes and dross, but to the young men from the towns
and villages of Northern Italy, who still felt freshly and purely
the mighty influence of the thought of civic freedom; who were still
capable of fighting and of dying for ideals; who had themselves
received for their country in a revolutionary way from Caesar
the burgess-rights which the government refused to them;
whom Caesar's fall would leave once more at the mercy of the -fasces-,
and who already possessed practical proofs(26) of the inexorable use
which the oligarchy proposed to make of these against the Transpadanes.
Such were the listeners before whom such an orator set forth the facts--
the thanks for the conquest of Gaul which the nobility were preparing
for the general and his army; the contemptuous setting aside
of the comitia; the overawing of the senate; the sacred duty
of protecting with armed hand the tribunate of the people wrested
five hundred years ago by their fathers arms in hand from the nobility,
and of keeping the ancient oath which these had taken for themselves
as for their children's children that they would man by man stand firm
even to death for the tribunes of the people.(27)  And then, when he--
the leader and general of the popular party--summoned the soldiers
of the people, now that conciliatory means had been exhausted
and concession had reached its utmost limits, to follow him in the last,
the inevitable, the decisive struggle against the equally hated
and despised, equally perfidious and incapable, and in fact ludicrously
incorrigible aristocracy--there was not an officer or a soldier
who could hold back.  The order was given for departure; at the head
of his vanguard Caesar crossed the narrow brook which separated
his province from Italy, and which the constitution forbade
the proconsul of Gaul to pass.  When after nine years' absence
he trod once more the soil of his native land, he trod at the same time
the path of revolution.  "The die was cast."




Chapter X

Brundisium, Ilerda, Pharsalus, and Thapsus

The Resources on Either Side

Arms were thus to decide which of the two men who had hitherto
jointly ruled Rome was now to be its first sole ruler.  Let us see
what were the comparative resources at the disposal of Caesar
and Pompeius for the waging of the impending war.

Caesar's Absolute Power within His Party

Caesar's power rested primarily on the wholly unlimited authority
which he enjoyed within his party.  If the ideas of democracy
and of monarchy met together in it, this was not the result
of a coalition which had been accidentally entered into and might be
accidentally dissolved; on the contrary it was involved
in the very essence of a democracy without a representative constitution,
that democracy and monarchy should find in Caesar at once their highest
and ultimate expression.  In political as in military matters
throughout the first and the final decision lay with Caesar.
However high the honour in which he held any serviceable instrument,
it remained an instrument still; Caesar stood, in his own party
without confederates, surrounded only by military-political
adjutants, who as a rule had risen from the army and as soldiers
were trained never to ask the reason and purpose of any thing,
but unconditionally to obey.  On this account especially,
at the decisive moment when the civil war began, of all the officers
and soldiers of Caesar one alone refused him obedience;
and the circumstance that that one was precisely the foremost
of them all, serves simply to confirm this view of the relation
of Caesar to his adherents.

Labienus

Titus Labienus had shared with Caesar all the troubles of the dark times
of Catilina(1) as well as all the lustre of the Gallic career of victory,
had regularly held independent command, and frequently led half the army;
as he was the oldest, ablest, and most faithful of Caesar's adjutants,
he was beyond question also highest in position and highest in honour.
As late as in 704 Caesar had entrusted to him the supreme command
in Cisalpine Gaul, in order partly to put this confidential post
into safe hands, partly to forward the views of Labienus in his canvass
for the consulship.  But from this very position Labienus entered
into communication with the opposite party, resorted at the beginning
of hostilities in 705 to the headquarters of Pompeius instead of those
of Caesar, and fought through the whole civil strife with unparalleled
bitterness against his old friend and master in war.  We are not
sufficiently informed either as to the character of Labienus
or as to the special circumstances of his changing sides;
but in the main his case certainly presents nothing but a further proof
of the fact, that a military chief can reckon far more surely
on his captains than on his marshals.  To all appearance Labienus
was one of those persons who combine with military efficiency
utter incapacity as statesmen, and who in consequence, if they
unhappily choose or are compelled to take part in politics, are exposed
to those strange paroxysms of giddiness, of which the history
of Napoleon's marshals supplies so many tragi-comic examples.
He may probably have held himself entitled to rank alongside of Caesar
as the second chief of the democracy; and the rejection of this claim
of his may have sent him over to the camp of his opponents.
His case rendered for the first time apparent the whole gravity
of the evil, that Caesar's treatment of his officers as adjutants
without independence admitted of the rise of no men fitted to undertake
a separate command in his camp, while at the same time he stood
urgently in need of such men amidst the diffusion--which might easily
be foreseen--of the impending struggle through all the provinces
of the wide empire.  But this disadvantage was far outweighed
by that unity in the supreme leadership, which was the primary condition
of all success, and a condition only to be preserved at such a cost.

Caesar's Army

This unity of leadership acquired its full power through the efficiency
of its instruments.  Here the army comes, first of all, into view.
It still numbered nine legions of infantry or at the most
50,000 men, all of whom however had faced the enemy and two-thirds
had served in all the campaigns against the Celts. The cavalry
consisted of German and Noric mercenaries, whose usefulness
and trustworthiness had been proved in the war against Vercingetorix.
The eight years' warfare, full of varied vicissitudes,
against the Celtic nation--which was brave, although in a military
point of view decidedly inferior to the Italian--had given Caesar
the opportunity of organizing his army as he alone knew
how to organize it.  The whole efficiency of the soldier
presupposes physical vigour; in Caesar's levies more regard was had
to the strength and activity of the recruits than to their means
or their morals.  But the serviceableness of an army, like that
of any other machine, depends above all on the ease and quickness
of its movements; the soldiers of Caesar attained a perfection
rarely reached and probably never surpassed in their readiness
for immediate departure at any time, and in the rapidity
of their marching.  Courage, of course, was valued above everything;
Caesar practised with unrivalled mastery the art of stimulating
martial emulation and the esprit de corps, so that the pre-eminence
accorded to particular soldiers and divisions appeared even to those
who were postponed as the necessary hierarchy of valour.
He weaned his men from fear by not unfrequently--where it could be done
without serious danger--keeping his soldiers in ignorance
of an approaching conflict, and allowing them to encounter
the enemy unexpectedly.  But obedience was on a parity with valour.
The soldier was required to do what he was bidden, without asking
the reason or the object; many an aimless fatigue was imposed on him
solely as a training in the difficult art of blind obedience.
The discipline was strict but not harassing; it was exercised
with unrelenting vigour when the soldier was in presence of the enemy;
at other times, especially after victory, the reins were relaxed,
and if an otherwise efficient soldier was then pleased to indulge
in perfumery or to deck himself with elegant arms and the like,
or even if he allowed himself to be guilty of outrages
or irregularities of a very questionable kind, provided only
his military duties were not immediately affected, the foolery
and the crime were allowed to pass, and the general lent a deaf ear
to the complaints of the provincials on such points.  Mutiny
on the other hand was never pardoned, either in the instigators,
or even in the guilty corps itself.

But the true soldier ought to be not merely capable, brave,
and obedient, he ought to be all this willingly and spontaneously;
and it is the privilege of gifted natures alone to induce the animated
machine which they govern to a joyful service by means of example
and of hope, and especially by the consciousness of being turned
to befitting use.  As the officer, who would demand valour
from his troops, must himself have looked danger in the face with them,
Caesar had even when general found opportunity of drawing his sword
and had then used it like the best; in activity, moreover,
and fatigue he was constantly far more exacting from himself
than from his soldiers.  Caesar took care that victory, which primarily
no doubt brings gain to the general, should be associated also
with personal hopes in the minds of the soldiers.  We have already
mentioned that he knew how to render his soldiers enthusiastic
for the cause of the democracy, so far as the times which had become
prosaic still admitted of enthusiasm, and that the political equalization
of the Transpadane country--the native land of most of his soldiers--
with Italy proper was set forth as one of the objects of the struggle.(2)
Of course material recompenses were at the same time not wanting--
as well special rewards for distinguished feats of arms as general
rewards for every efficient soldier; the officers had their portions,
the soldiers received presents, and the most lavish gifts were placed
in prospect for the triumph.

Above all things Caesar as a true commander understood
how to awaken in every single component element, large or small,
of the mighty machine the consciousness of its befitting application.
The ordinary man is destined for service, and he has no objection
to be an instrument, if he feels that a master guides him.  Everywhere
and at all times the eagle eye of the general rested on the whole army,
rewarding and punishing with impartial justice, and directing
the action of each towards the course conducive to the good of all:
so that there was no experimenting or trifling with the sweat and blood
of the humblest, but for that very reason, where it was necessary,
unconditional devotion even to death was required. Without allowing
each individual to see into the whole springs of action,
Caesar yet allowed each to catch such glimpses of the political
and military connection of things as to secure that he should
be recognized--and it may be idealized--by the soldiers
as a statesman and a general.  He treated his soldiers throughout,
not as his equals, but as men who are entitled to demand and were able
to endure the truth, and who had to put faith in the promises
and the assurances of their general, without thinking of deception
or listening to rumours; as comrades through long years in warfare
and victory, among whom there was hardly any one that was not known
to him by name and that in the course of so many campaigns
had not formed more or less of a personal relation to the general;
as good companions, with whom he talked and dealt confidentially
and with the cheerful elasticity peculiar to him; as clients,
to requite whose services, and to avenge whose wrongs and death,
constituted in his view a sacred duty.  Perhaps there never was an army
which was so perfectly what an army ought to be--a machine able
for its ends and willing for its ends, in the hand of a master,
who transfers to it his own elasticity.  Caesar's soldiers were,
and felt themselves, a match for a tenfold superior force;
in connection with which it should not be overlooked, that under
the Roman tactics--calculated altogether for hand-to-hand conflict
and especially for combat with the sword--the practised Roman soldier
was superior to the novice in a far higher degree than is now the case
under the circumstances of modern times.(3)  But still more
than by the superiority of valour the adversaries of Caesar
felt themselves humbled by the unchangeable and touching fidelity
with which his soldiers clung to their general.  It is perhaps
without a parallel in history, that when the general summoned
his soldiers to follow him into the civil war, with the single exception
already mentioned of Labienus, no Roman officer and no Roman soldier
deserted him.  The hopes of his opponents as to an extensive
desertion were thwarted as ignominiously as the former attempts
to break up his army like that of Lucullus.(4)  Labienus himself
appeared in the camp of Pompeius with a band doubtless of Celtic
and German horsemen but without a single legionary.  Indeed
the soldiers, as if they would show that the war was quite as much
their matter as that of their general, settled among themselves
that they would give credit for the pay, which Caesar had promised
to double for them at the outbreak of the civil war, to their commander
up to its termination, and would meanwhile support their poorer comrades
from the general means; besides, every subaltern officer
equipped and paid a trooper out of his own purse.

Field of Caesar's Power
Upper Italy

While Caesar thus had the one thing which was needful--
unlimited political and military authority and a trustworthy army
ready for the fight--his power extended, comparatively speaking,
over only a very limited space.  It was based essentially
on the province of Upper Italy.  This region was not merely
the most populous of all the districts of Italy, but also devoted
to the cause of the democracy as its own.  The feeling
which prevailed there is shown by the conduct of a division of recruits
from Opitergium (Oderzo in the delegation of Treviso), which not long
after the outbreak of the war in the Illyrian waters, surrounded
on a wretched raft by the war-vessels of the enemy, allowed themselves
to be shot at during the whole day down to sunset without surrendering,
and, such of them as had escaped the missiles, put themselves to death
with their own hands during the following night.  It is easy to conceive
what might be expected of such a population.  As they had already
granted to Caesar the means of more than doubling his original army,
so after the outbreak of the civil war recruits presented themselves
in great numbers for the ample levies that were immediately instituted.

Italy

In Italy proper, on the other hand, the influence of Caesar was not
even remotely to be compared to that of his opponents.  Although
he had the skill by dexterous manoeuvres to put the Catonian party
in the wrong, and had sufficiently commended the rectitude
of his cause to all who wished for a pretext with a good conscience
either to remain neutral, like the majority of the senate,
or to embrace his side, like his soldiers and the Transpadanes,
the mass of the burgesses naturally did not allow themselves to be misled
by these things and, when the commandant of Gaul put his legions
in motion against Rome, they beheld--despite all formal explanations
as to law--in Cato and Pompeius the defenders of the legitimate republic,
in Caesar the democratic usurper.  People in general moreover
expected from the nephew of Marius, the son-in-law of Cinna,
the ally of Catilina, a repetition of the Marian and Cinnan horrors,
a realization of the saturnalia of anarchy projected by Catilina;
and though Caesar certainly gained allies through this expectation--
so that the political refugees immediately put themselves in a body
at his disposal, the ruined men saw in him their deliverer,
and the lowest ranks of the rabble in the capital and country towns
were thrown into a ferment on the news of his advance,--these belonged
to the class of friends who are more dangerous than foes.

Provinces

In the provinces and the dependent states Caesar had
even less influence than in Italy.  Transalpine Gaul indeed as far as
the Rhine and the Channel obeyed him, and the colonists of Narbo
as well as the Roman burgesses elsewhere settled in Gaul
were devoted to him; but in the Narbonese province itself
the constitutional party had numerous adherents, and now even
the newly-conquered regions were far more a burden than a benefit
to Caesar in the impending civil war; in fact, for good reasons
he made no use of the Celtic infantry at all in that war,
and but sparing use of the cavalry.  In the other provinces
and the neighbouring half or wholly independent states
Caesar had indeed attempted to procure for himself support,
had lavished rich presents on the princes, caused great buildings
to be executed in various towns, and granted to them in case of need
financial and military assistance; but on the whole, of course,
not much had been gained by this means, and the relations
with the German and Celtic princes in the regions of the Rhine
and the Danube,--particularly the connection with the Noric king Voccio,
so important for the recruiting of cavalry,--were probably
the only relations of this sort which were of any moment for him.

The Coalition

While Caesar thus entered the struggle only as commandant of Gaul,
without other essential resources than efficient adjutants,
a faithful army, and a devoted province, Pompeius began it
as de facto supreme head of the Roman commonwealth, and in full
possession of all the resources that stood at the disposal
of the legitimate government of the great Roman empire.  But while
his position was in a political and military point of view
far more considerable, it was also on the other hand far less definite
and firm.  The unity of leadership, which resulted of itself
and by necessity from the position of Caesar, was inconsistent
with the nature of a coalition; and although Pompeius, too much
of a soldier to deceive himself as to its being indispensable,
attempted to force it on the coalition and got himself nominated
by the senate as sole and absolute generalissimo by land and sea,
yet the senate itself could not be set aside nor hindered
from a preponderating influence on the political, and an occasional
and therefore doubly injurious interference with the military,
superintendence.  The recollection of the twenty years' war
waged on both sides with envenomed weapons between Pompeius
and the constitutional party; the feeling which vividly prevailed
on both sides, and which they with difficulty concealed,
that the first consequence of the victory when achieved would be
a rupture between the victors; the contempt which they entertained
for each other and with only too good grounds in either case;
the inconvenient number of respectable and influential men in the ranks
of the aristocracy and the intellectual and moral inferiority
of almost all who took part in the matter--altogether produced
among the opponents of Caesar a reluctant and refractory co-operation,
which formed the saddest contrast to the harmonious and compact action
on the other side.

Field of Power of the Coalition
Juba of Numidia

While all the disadvantages incident to the coalition of powers
naturally hostile were thus felt in an unusual measure by Caesar's
antagonists, this coalition was certainly still a very considerable power.
It had exclusive command of the sea; all ports, all ships of war,
all the materials for equipping a fleet were at its disposal.
The two Spains--as it were the home of the power of Pompeius
just as the two Gauls were the home of that of Caesar--
were faithful adherents to their master and in the hands of able
and trustworthy administrators.  In the other provinces also,
of course with the exception of the two Gauls, the posts
of the governors and commanders had during recent years been filled up
with safe men under the influence of Pompeius and the minority
of the senate.  The client-states throughout and with great decision
took part against Caesar and in favour of Pompeius.  The most important
princes and cities had been brought into the closest personal relations
with Pompeius in virtue of the different sections of his manifold
activity.  In the war against the Marians, for instance, he had been
the companion in arms of the kings of Numidia and Mauretania and had
reestablished the kingdom of the former;(5) in the Mithradatic war,
in addition to a number of other minor principalities spiritual
and temporal, he had re-established the kingdoms of Bosporus, Armenia,
and Cappadocia, and created that of Deiotarus in Galatia;(6)
it was primarily at his instigation that the Egyptian war was undertaken,
and it was by his adjutant that the rule of the Lagids
had been confirmed afresh.(7)  Even the city of Massilia
in Caesar's own province, while indebted to the latter
doubtless for various favours, was indebted to Pompeius
at the time of the Sertorian war for a very considerable extension
of territory;(8) and, besides, the ruling oligarchy there stood
in natural alliance--strengthened by various mutual relations--
with the oligarchy in Rome.  But these personal and relative
considerations as well as the glory of the victor in three continents,
which in these more remote parts of the empire far outshone
that of the conqueror of Gaul, did perhaps less harm to Caesar
in those quarters than the views and designs--which had not remained
there unknown--of the heir of Gaius Gracchus as to the necessity
of uniting the dependent states and the usefulness of provincial
colonizations.  No one of the dependent dynasts found himself
more imminently threatened by this peril than Juba king
of Numidia.  Not only had he years before, in the lifetime
of his father Hiempsal, fallen into a vehement personal quarrel
with Caesar, but recently the same Curio, who now occupied almost
the first place among Caesar's adjutants, had proposed to the Roman
burgesses the annexation of the Numidian kingdom.  Lastly, if matters
should go so far as to lead the independent neighbouring states
to interfere in the Roman civil war, the only state really powerful,
that of the Parthians, was practically already allied
with the aristocratic party by the connection entered into
between Pacorus and Bibulus,(9) while Caesar was far too much a Roman
to league himself for party-interests with the conquerors
of his friend Crassus.

Italy against Caesar

As to Italy the great majority of the burgesses were, as has been
already mentioned, averse to Caesar--more especially, of course,
the whole aristocracy with their very considerable following,
but also in a not much less degree the great capitalists,
who could not hope in the event of a thorough reform of the commonwealth
to preserve their partisan jury-courts and their monopoly of extortion.
Of equally anti-democratic sentiments were the small capitalists,
the landholders and generally all classes that had anything to lose;
but in these ranks of life the cares of the next rent-term and of sowing
and reaping outweighed, as a rule, every other consideration.

The Pompeian Army

The army at the disposal of Pompeius consisted chiefly
of the Spanish troops, seven legions inured to war and in every respect
trustworthy; to which fell to be added the divisions of troops--
weak indeed, and very much scattered--which were to be found
in Syria, Asia, Macedonia, Africa, Sicily, and elsewhere.  In Italy
there were under arms at the outset only the two legions
recently given off by Caesar, whose effective strength did not amount
to more than 7000 men, and whose trustworthiness was more than doubtful,
because--levied in Cisalpine Gaul and old comrades in arms
of Caesar--they were in a high degree displeased at the unbecoming
intrigue by which they had been made to change camps,(10)
and recalled with longing their general who had magnanimously
paid to them beforehand at their departure the presents
which were promised to every soldier for the triumph.
But, apart from the circumstance that the Spanish troops might arrive
in Italy with the spring either by the land route through Gaul
or by sea, the men of the three legions still remaining
from the levies of 699,(11) as well as the Italian levy sworn
to allegiance in 702,(12) could be recalled from their furlough.
Including these, the number of troops standing at the disposal
of Pompeius on the whole, without reckoning the seven legions in Spain
and those scattered in other provinces, amounted in Italy alone
to ten legions(13) or about 60,000 men, so that it was no exaggeration
at all, when Pompeius asserted that he had only to stamp
with his foot to cover the ground with armed men.  It is true
that it required some interval--though but short--to render
these soldiers available; but the arrangements for this purpose
as well as for the carrying out of the new levies ordered by the senate
in consequence of the outbreak of the civil war were already
everywhere in progress.  Immediately after the decisive decree
of the senate (7 Jan. 705), in the very depth of winter
the most eminent men of the aristocracy set out to the different
districts, to hasten the calling up of recruits and the preparation
of arms.  The want of cavalry was much felt, as for this arm
they had been accustomed to rely wholly on the provinces and especially
on the Celtic contingents; to make at least a beginning,
three hundred gladiators belonging to Caesar were taken
from the fencing-schools of Capua and mounted--a step which however
met with so general disapproval, that Pompeius again broke up
this troop and levied in room of it 300 horsemen from the mounted
slave-herdmen of Apulia.

The state-treasury was at a low ebb as usual; they busied themselves
in supplementing the inadequate amount of cash out of the local
treasuries and even from the temple-treasures of the -municipia-.

Caesar Takes the Offensive

Under these circumstances the war opened at the beginning
of January 705.  Of troops capable of marching Caesar had not
more than a legion--5000 infantry and 300 cavalry--at Ravenna,
which was by the highway some 240 miles distant from Rome; Pompeius
had two weak legions--7000 infantry and a small squadron of cavalry--
under the orders of Appius Claudius at Luceria, from which,
likewise by the highway, the distance was just about as great
to the capital.  The other troops of Caesar, leaving out of account
the raw divisions of recruits still in course of formation,
were stationed, one half on the Saone and Loire, the other half
in Belgica, while Pompeius' Italian reserves were already arriving
from all sides at their rendezvous; long before even the first
of the Transalpine divisions of Caesar could arrive in Italy,
a far superior army could not but be ready to receive it there.
It seemed folly, with a band of the strength of that of Catilina
and for the moment without any effective reserve, to assume
the aggressive against a superior and hourly-increasing army
under an able general; but it was a folly in the spirit of Hannibal.
If the beginning of the struggle were postponed till spring,
the Spanish troops of Pompeius would assume the offensive
in Transalpine, and his Italian troops in Cisalpine, Gaul,
and Pompeius, a match for Caesar in tactics and superior to him
in experience, was a formidable antagonist in such a campaign
running its regular course.  Now perhaps, accustomed as he was
to operate slowly and surely with superior masses, he might
be disconcerted by a wholly improvised attack; and that which
could not greatly discompose Caesar's thirteenth legion
after the severe trial of the Gallic surprise and the January campaign
in the land of the Bellovaci,(14)--the suddenness of the war and the toil
of a winter campaign--could not but disorganize the Pompeian corps
consisting of old soldiers of Caesar or of ill-trained recruits,
and still only in the course of formation.

Caesar's Advance

Accordingly Caesar advanced into Italy.(15) Two highways led
at that time from the Romagna to the south; the Aemilio-Cassian
which led from Bononia over the Apennines to Arretium and Rome,
and the Popillio-Flaminian, which led from Ravenna along the coast
of the Adriatic to Fanum and was there divided, one branch running
westward through the Furlo pass to Rome, another southward
to Ancona and thence onward to Apulia.  On the former Marcus Antonius
advanced as far as Arretium, on the second Caesar himself
pushed forward.  Resistance was nowhere encountered; the recruiting
officers of quality had no military skill, their bands of recruits
were no soldiers, the inhabitants of the country towns were only anxious
not to be involved in a siege.  When Curio with 1500 men
approached Iguvium, where a couple of thousand Umbrian recruits
had assembled under the praetor Quintus Minucius Thermus,
general and soldiers took to flight at the bare tidings of his approach;
and similar results on a small scale everywhere ensued.

Rome Evacuated

Caesar had to choose whether he would march against Rome, from which
his cavalry at Arretium were already only about 130 miles distant,
or against the legions encamped at Luceria.  He chose the latter plan.
The consternation of the opposite party was boundless.
Pompeius received the news of Caesar's advance at Rome; he seemed
at first disposed to defend the capital, but, when the tidings
arrived of Caesar's entrance into the Picenian territory
and of his first successes there, he abandoned Rome and ordered
its evacuation.  A panic, augmented by the false report that Caesar's
cavalry had appeared before the gates, came over the world of quality.
The senators, who had been informed that every one who should
remain behind in the capital would be treated as an accomplice
of the rebel Caesar, flocked in crowds out at the gates.
The consuls themselves had so totally lost their senses, that they
did not even secure the treasure; when Pompeius called upon them
to fetch it, for which there was sufficient time, they returned
the reply that they would deem it safer, if he should first
occupy Picenum.  All was perplexity; consequently a great council of war
was held in Teanum Sidicinum (23 Jan.), at which Pompeius, Labienus,
and both consuls were present.  First of all proposals of accommodation
from Caesar were again submitted; even now he declared himself
ready at once to dismiss his army, to hand over his provinces
to the successors nominated, and to become a candidate
in the regular way for the consulship, provided that Pompeius
were to depart for Spain, and Italy were to be disarmed.
The answer was, that if Caesar would immediately return to his province,
they would bind themselves to procure the disarming of Italy
and the departure of Pompeius by a decree of the senate
to be passed in due form in the capital; perhaps this reply
was intended not as a bare artifice to deceive, but as an acceptance
of the proposal of compromise; it was, however, in reality the opposite.
The personal conference which Caesar desired with Pompeius
the latter declined, and could not but decline, that he might not
by the semblance of a new coalition with Caesar provoke still more
the distrust already felt by the constitutional party.  Concerning
the management of the war it was agreed in Teanum, that Pompeius
should take the command of the troops stationed at Luceria,
on which notwithstanding their untrustworthiness all hope depended;
that he should advance with these into his own and Labienus'
native country, Picenum; that he should personally call
the general levy there to arms, as he had done some thirty-five
years ago,(16) and should attempt at the head of the faithful
Picentine cohorts and the veterans formerly under Caesar
to set a limit to the advance of the enemy.

Conflicts in Picenum

Everything depended on whether Picenum would hold out
until Pompeius should come up to its defence.  Already Caesar
with his reunited army had penetrated into it along the coast road
by way of Ancona.  Here too the preparations were in full course;
in the very northernmost Picenian town Auximum a considerable band
of recruits was collected under Publius Attius Varus; but at the entreaty
of the municipality Varus evacuated the town even before Caesar
appeared, and a handful of Caesar's soldiers which overtook the troop
not far from Auximum totally dispersed it after a brief conflict--
the first in this war.  In like manner soon afterwards
Gaius Lucilius Hirrus with 3000 men evacuated Camerinum,
and Publius Lentulus Spinther with 5000 Asculum.  The men,
thoroughly devoted to Pompeius, willingly for the most part abandoned
their houses and farms, and followed their leaders over the frontier;
but the district itself was already lost, when the officer
sent by Pompeius for the temporary conduct of the defence,
Lucius Vibullius Rufus--no genteel senator, but a soldier
experienced in war--arrived there; he had to content himself
with taking the six or seven thousand recruits who were saved
away from the incapable recruiting officers, and conducting them
for the time to the nearest rendezvous.

Corfinium Besieged
And Captured

This was Corfinium, the place of meeting for the levies in the Albensian,
Marsian and Paelignian territories; the body of recruits here assembled,
of nearly 15,000 men, was the contingent of the most warlike
and trustworthy regions of Italy, and the flower of the army
in course of formation for the constitutional party.  When Vibullius
arrived here, Caesar was still several days' march behind;
there was nothing to prevent him from immediately starting agreeably
to Pompeius' instructions and conducting the saved Picenian recruits
along with those assembled at Corfinium to join the main army in Apulia.
But the commandant in Corfinium was the designated successor to Caesar
in the governorship of Transalpine Gaul, Lucius Domitius,
one of the most narrow-minded and stubborn of the Roman aristocracy;
and he not only refused to comply with the orders of Pompeius,
but also prevented Vibullius from departing at least with the men
from Picenum for Apulia.  So firmly was he persuaded that Pompeius
only delayed from obstinacy and must necessarily come up to his relief,
that he scarcely made any serious preparations for a siege
and did not even gather into Corfinium the bands of recruits
placed in the surrounding towns. Pompeius however did not appear,
and for good reasons; for, while he might perhaps apply
his two untrustworthy legions as a reserved support for the Picenian
general levy, he could not with them alone offer battle to Caesar.
Instead of him after a few days Caesar came (14 Feb.).  His troops
had been joined in Picenum by the twelfth, and before Corfinium
by the eighth, legion from beyond the Alps, and, besides these,
three new legions had been formed partly from the Pompeian men
that were taken prisoners or presented themselves voluntarily,
partly from the recruits that were at once levied everywhere;
so that Caesar before Corfinium was already at the head
of an army of 40,000 men, half of whom had seen service.  So long as
 Domitius hoped for the arrival of Pompeius, he caused the town
to be defended; when the letters of Pompeius had at length undeceived him,
he resolved, not forsooth to persevere at the forlorn post--
by which he would have rendered the greatest service to his party--
nor even to capitulate, but, while the common soldiers
were informed that relief was close at hand, to make his own escape
along with his officers of quality during the next night.
Yet he had not the judgment to carry into effect even this pretty scheme.
The confusion of his behaviour betrayed him.  A part of the men
began to mutiny; the Marsian recruits, who held such an infamy
on the part of their general to be impossible, wished to fight
against the mutineers; but they too were obliged reluctantly
to believe the truth of the accusation, whereupon the whole garrison
arrested their staff and handed it, themselves, and the town
over to Caesar (20 Feb.).  The corps in Alba, 3000 strong,
and 1500 recruits assembled in Tarracina thereupon laid down
their arms, as soon as Caesar's patrols of horsemen appeared;
a third division in Sulmo of 3500 men had been previously
compelled to surrender.

Pompeius Goes to Brundisium
Embarkation for Greece

Pompeius had given up Italy as lost, so soon as Caesar
had occupied Picenum; only he wished to delay his embarkation
as long as possible, with the view of saving so much of his force
as could still be saved.  Accordingly he had slowly put himself
in motion for the nearest seaport Brundisium.  Thither came
the two legions of Luceria and such recruits as Pompeius
had been able hastily to collect in the deserted Apulia,
as well as the troops raised by the consuls and other commissioners
in Campania and conducted in all haste to Brundisium;
thither too resorted a number of political fugitives,
including the most respected of the senators accompanied
by their families.  The embarkation began; but the vessels at hand
did not suffice to transport all at once the whole multitude,
which still amounted to 25,000 persons.  No course remained
but to divide the army.  The larger half went first (4 March);
with the smaller division of some 10,000 men Pompeius
awaited at Brundisium the return of the fleet; for, however desirable
the possession of Brundisium might be for an eventual attempt
to reoccupy Italy, they did not presume to hold the place
permanently against Caesar.  Meanwhile Caesar arrived
before Brundisium; the siege began.  Caesar attempted first of all
to close the mouth of the harbour by moles and floating bridges,
with a view to exclude the returning fleet; but Pompeius
caused the trading vessels lying in the harbour to be armed,
and managed to prevent the complete closing of the harbour
until the fleet appeared and the troops--whom Pompeius
with great dexterity, in spite of the vigilance of the besiegers
and the hostile feeling of the inhabitants, withdrew from the town
to the last man unharmed--were carried off beyond Caesar's reach
to Greece (17 March).  The further pursuit, like the siege itself,
failed for want of a fleet.

In a campaign of two months, without a single serious engagement,
Caesar had so broken up an army of ten legions, that less than
the half of it had with great difficulty escaped in a confused flight
across the sea, and the whole Italian peninsula, including the capital
with the state-chest and all the stores accumulated there,
had fallen into the power of the victor.  Not without reason
did the beaten party bewail the terrible rapidity, sagacity,
and energy of the "monster."

Military and Financial Results of the Seizure of Italy

But it may be questioned whether Caesar gained or lost more
by the conquest of Italy.  In a military respect, no doubt,
very considerable resources were now not merely withdrawn
from his opponents, but rendered available for himself;
even in the spring of 705 his army embraced, in consequence
of the levies en masse instituted everywhere, a considerable
number of legions of recruits in addition to the nine old ones
But on the other hand it now became necessary not merely
to leave behind a considerable garrison in Italy, but also
to take measures against the closing of the transmarine traffic
contemplated by his opponents who commanded the sea, and against
the famine with which the capital was consequently threatened;
whereby Caesar's already sufficiently complicated military task
was complicated further still.  Financially it was certainly
of importance, that Caesar had the good fortune to obtain
possession of the stock of money in the capital; but the principal
sources of income and particularly the revenues from the east
were withal in the hands of the enemy, and, in consequence
of the greatly increased demands for the army and the new obligation
to provide for the starving population of the capital,
the considerable sums which were found quickly melted away.
Caesar soon found himself compelled to appeal to private credit,
and, as it seemed that he could not possibly gain any long respite
by this means, extensive confiscations were generally anticipated
as the only remaining expedient.

Its Political Results
Fear of Anarchy

More serious difficulties still were created by the political relations
amidst which Caesar found himself placed on the conquest of Italy.
The apprehension of an anarchical revolution was universal
among the propertied classes.  Friends and foes saw in Caesar
a second Catilina; Pompeius believed or affected to believe
that Caesar had been driven to civil war merely by the impossibility
of paying his debts.  This was certainly absurd; but in fact Caesar's
antecedents were anything but reassuring, and still less reassuring
was the aspect of the retinue that now surrounded him.
Individuals of the most broken reputation, notorious personages
like Quintus Hortensius, Gaius Curio, Marcus Antonius,--
the latter the stepson of the Catilinarian Lentulus who was executed
by the orders of Cicero--were the most prominent actors in it;
the highest posts of trust were bestowed on men who had long ceased
even to reckon up their debts; people saw men who held office
under Caesar not merely keeping dancing-girls--which was done
by others also--but appearing publicly in company with them.
Was there any wonder, that even grave and politically impartial men
expected amnesty for all exiled criminals, cancelling
of creditors' claims, comprehensive mandates of confiscation,
proscription, and murder, nay, even a plundering of Rome
by the Gallic soldiery?

Dispelled by Caesar

But in this respect the "monster" deceived the expectations
of his foes as well as of his friends.  As soon even as Caesar occupied
the first Italian town, Ariminum, he prohibited all common soldiers
from appearing armed within the walls; the country towns
were protected from all injury throughout and without distinction,
whether they had given him a friendly or hostile reception.
When the mutinous garrison surrendered Corfinium late in the evening,
he in the face of every military consideration postponed
the occupation of the town till the following morning, solely
that he might not abandon the burgesses to the nocturnal invasion
of his exasperated soldiers.  Of the prisoners the common soldiers,
as presumably indifferent to politics, were incorporated
with his own army, while the officers were not merely spared,
but also freely released without distinction of person and without
the exaction of any promises whatever; and all which they claimed
as private property was frankly given up to them, without even
investigating with any strictness the warrant for their claims.
Lucius Domitius himself was thus treated, and even Labienus had the money
and baggage which he had left behind sent after him to the enemy's camp.
In the most painful financial embarrassment the immense estates
of his opponents whether present or absent were not assailed; indeed
Caesar preferred to borrow from friends, rather than that he should
stir up the possessors of property against him even by exacting
the formally admissible, but practically antiquated, land tax.(17)
The victor regarded only the half, and that not the more difficult half,
of his task as solved with the victory; he saw the security
for its duration, according to his own expression, only
in the unconditional pardon of the vanquished, and had accordingly
during the whole march from Ravenna to Brundisium incessantly
renewed his efforts to bring about a personal conference
with Pompeius and a tolerable accommodation.

Threats of the Emigrants
The Mass of Quiet People Gained for Caesar

But, if the aristocracy had previously refused to listen
to any reconciliation, the unexpected emigration of a kind
so disgraceful had raised their wrath to madness, and the wild vengeance
breathed by the beaten contrasted strangely with the placability
of the victor.  The communications regularly coming from the camp
of the emigrants to their friends left behind in Italy
were full of projects for confiscations and proscriptions,
of plans for purifying the senate and the state, compared with which
the restoration of Sulla was child's play, and which even
the moderate men of their own party heard with horror.
The frantic passion of impotence, the wise moderation of power,
produced their effect.  The whole mass, in whose eyes material interests
were superior to political, threw itself into the arms of Caesar.
The country towns idolized "the uprightness, the moderation,
the prudence" of the victor; and even opponents conceded
that these demonstrations of respect were meant in earnest.
The great capitalists, farmers of the taxes, and jurymen,
showed no special desire, after the severe shipwreck
which had befallen the constitutional party in Italy,
to entrust themselves farther to the same pilots; capital came
once more to the light, and "the rich lords resorted again to their
daily task of writing their rent-rolls."  Even the great majority
of the senate, at least numerically speaking--for certainly but few
of the nobler and more influential members of the senate
were included in it--had notwithstanding the orders of Pompeius
and of the consuls remained behind in Italy, and a portion of them
even in the capital itself; and they acquiesced in Caesar's rule.
The moderation of Caesar, well calculated even in its very semblance
of excess, attained its object: the trembling anxiety of the propertied
classes as to the impending anarchy was in some measure allayed.
This was doubtless an incalculable gain for the future;
the prevention of anarchy, and of the scarcely less dangerous alarm
of anarchy, was the indispensable preliminary condition
to the future reorganization of the commonwealth.

Indignation of the Anarchist Party against Caesar
The Republican Party in Italy

But at the moment this moderation was more dangerous for Caesar
than the renewal of the Cinnan and Catilinarian fury would have been;
it did not convert enemies into friends, and it converted
friends into enemies.  Caesar's Catilinarian adherents
were indignant that murder and pillage remained in abeyance;
these audacious and desperate personages, some of whom
were men of talent, might be expected to prove cross and untractable.
The republicans of all shades, on the other hand, were neither
converted nor propitiated by the leniency of the conqueror.
According to the creed of the Catonian party, duty towards
what they called their fatherland absolved them from every
other consideration; even one who owed freedom and life to Caesar
remained entitled and in duty bound to take up arms or at least
to engage in plots against him.  The less decided sections
of the constitutional party were no doubt found willing to accept peace
and protection from the new monarch; nevertheless they ceased not
to curse the monarchy and the monarch at heart.  The more clearly
the change of the constitution became manifest, the more distinctly
the great majority of the burgesses--both in the capital with its
keener susceptibility of political excitement, and among
the more energetic population of the country and country towns--
awoke to a consciousness of their republican sentiments; so far
the friends of the constitution in Rome reported with truth
to their brethren of kindred views in exile, that at home all classes
and all persons were friendly to Pompeius.  The discontented temper
of all these circles was further increased by the moral pressure,
which the more decided and more notable men who shared such views
exercised from their very position as emigrants over the multitude
of the humbler and more lukewarm.  The conscience of the honourable man
smote him in regard to his remaining in Italy; the half-aristocrat
fancied that he was ranked among the plebeians, if he did not go
into exile with the Domitii and the Metelli, and even if he took his seat
in the Caesarian senate of nobodies.  The victor's special clemency
gave to this silent opposition increased political importance;
seeing that Caesar abstained from terrorism, it seemed as if
his secret opponents could display their disinclination
to his rule without much danger.

Passive Resistance of the Senate to Caesar

Very soon he experienced remarkable treatment in this respect
at the hands of the senate.  Caesar had begun the struggle
to liberate the overawed senate from its oppressors.  This was done;
consequently he wished to obtain from the senate approval
of what had been done, and full powers for the continuance of the war.
for this purpose, when Caesar appeared before the capital (end of March)
the tribunes of the people belonging to his party convoked for him
the senate (1 April).  The meeting was tolerably numerous,
but the more notable of the very senators that remained in Italy
were absent, including even the former leader of the servile majority
Marcus Cicero and Caesar's own father-in-law Lucius Piso;
and, what was worse, those who did appear were not inclined
to enter into Caesar's proposals.  When Caesar spoke of full power
to continue the war, one of the only two consulars present,
Servius Sulpicius Rufus, a very timid man who desired nothing
but a quiet death in his bed, was of opinion that Caesar would deserve
well of his country if he should abandon the thought of carrying
the war to Greece and Spain.  When Caesar thereupon requested the senate
at least to be the medium of transmitting his peace proposals
to Pompeius, they were not indeed opposed to that course in itself,
but the threats of the emigrants against the neutrals had so terrified
the latter, that no one was found to undertake the message of peace.
Through the disinclination of the aristocracy to help the erection
of the monarch's throne, and through the same inertness
of the dignified corporation, by means of which Caesar
had shortly before frustrated the legal nomination of Pompeius
as generalissimo in the civil war, he too was now thwarted when making
a like request.  Other impediments, moreover, occurred.  Caesar desired,
with the view of regulating in some sort of way his position,
to be named as dictator; but his wish was not complied with,
because such a magistrate could only be constitutionally appointed
by one of the consuls, and the attempt of Caesar to buy
the consul Lentulus--of which owing to the disordered condition
of his finances there was a good prospect--nevertheless proved
a failure.  The tribune of the people Lucius Metellus, moreover,
lodged a protest against all the steps of the proconsul, and made signs
as though he would protect with his person the public chest,
when Caesar's men came to empty it.  Caesar could not avoid
in this case ordering that the inviolable person should be pushed aside
as gently as possible; otherwise, he kept by his purpose of abstaining
from all violent steps.  He declared to the senate, just as
the constitutional party had done shortly before, that he had
certainly desired to regulate things in a legal way and with the help
of the supreme authority; but, since this help was refused,
he could dispense with it.

Provisional Arrangement of the Affairs of the Capital
The Provinces

Without further concerning himself about the senate and the formalities
of state law, he handed over the temporary administration
of the capital to the praetor Marcus Aemilius Lepidus as city-prefect,
and made the requisite arrangements for the administration
of the provinces that obeyed him and the continuance of the war.
Even amidst the din of the gigantic struggle, and with all
the alluring sound of Caesar's lavish promises, it still made
a deep impression on the multitude of the capital, when they saw
in their free Rome the monarch for the first time wielding
a monarch's power and breaking open the doors of the treasury
by his soldiers.  But the times had gone by, when the impressions
and feelings of the multitude determined the course of events;
it was with the legions that the decision lay, and a few
painful feelings more or less were of no farther moment.

Pompeians in Spain

Caesar hastened to resume the war.  He owed his successes
hitherto to the offensive, and he intended still to maintain it.
The position of his antagonist was singular.  After the original plan
of carrying on the campaign simultaneously in the two Gauls
by offensive operations from the bases of Italy and Spain had been
frustrated by Caesar's aggressive, Pompeius had intended to go to Spain.
There he had a very strong position.  The army amounted
to seven legions; a large number of Pompeius' veterans served in it,
and several years of conflicts in the Lusitanian mountains
had hardened soldiers and officers.  Among its captains Marcus Varro
indeed was simply a celebrated scholar and a faithful partisan;
but Lucius Afranius had fought with distinction in the east
and in the Alps, and Marcus Petreius, the conqueror of Catilina,
was an officer as dauntless as he was able.  While in the Further
province Caesar had still various adherents from the time
of his governorship there,(18) the more important province
of the Ebrowas attached by all the ties of veneration and gratitude
to the celebrated general, who twenty years before had held the command
in it during the Sertorian war, and after the termination of that war
had organized it anew.  Pompeius could evidently after the Italian
disaster do nothing better than proceed to Spain with the saved remnant
of his army, and then at the head of his whole force advance
to meet Caesar.  But unfortunately he had, in the hope of being able
still to save the troops that were in Corfinium, tarried in Apuli
so long that he was compelled to choose the nearer Brundisium
as his place of embarkation instead of the Campanian ports.
Why, master as he was of the sea and Sicily, he did not
subsequently revert to his original plan, cannot be determined;
whether it was that perhaps the aristocracy after their short-sighted
and distrustful fashion showed no desire to entrust themselves
to the Spanish troops and the Spanish population, it is enough
to say that Pompeius remained in the east, and Caesar had the option
of directing his first attack either against the army which was
being organized in Greece under Pompeius' own command, or against
that which was ready for battle under his lieutenants in Spain.
He had decided in favour of the latter course, and, as soon as
the Italian campaign ended, had taken measures to collect
on the lower Rhone nine of his best legions, as also 6000 cavalry--
partly men individually picked out by Caesar in the Celtic cantons,
partly German mercenaries--and a number of Iberian and Ligurian archers.

Massilia against Caesar

But at this point his opponents also had been active.  Lucius Domitius,
who was nominated by the senate in Caesar's stead as governor
of Transalpine Gaul, had proceeded from Corfinium--as soon as
Caesar had released him--along with his attendants and with Pompeius'
confidant Lucius Vibullius Rufus to Massilia, and actually induced
that city to declare for Pompeius and even to refuse a passage
to Caesar's troops.  Of the Spanish troops the two least trustworthy
legions were left behind under the command of Varro in the Further
province; while the five best, reinforced by 40,000 Spanish infantry--
partly Celtiberian infantry of the line, partly Lusitanian
and other light troops--and by 5000 Spanish cavalry, under Afranius
and Petreius, had, in accordance with the orders of Pompeius
transmitted by Vibullius, set out to close the Pyrenees
against the enemy.


Caesar Occupies the Pyrenees
Position at Ilerda

Meanwhile Caesar himself arrived in Gaul and, as the commencement
of the siege of Massilia still detained him in person,
he immediately despatched the greater part of his troops assembled
on the Rhone--six legions and the cavalry--along the great road
leading by way of Narbo (Narbonne) to Rhode (Rosas) with the view
of anticipating the enemy at the Pyrenees.  The movement was successful;
when Afranius and Petreius arrived at the passes, they found them
already occupied by the Caesarians and the line of the Pyrenees lost.
They then took up a position at Ilerda (Lerida) between the Pyrenees
and the Ebro.  This town lies twenty miles to the north
of the Ebro on the right bank of one of its tributaries,
the Sicoris (Segre), which was crossed by only a single solid bridge
immediately at Ilerda.  To the south of Ilerda the mountains
which adjoin the left bank of the Ebro approach pretty close to the town;
to the northward there stretches on both sides of the Sicoris
a level country which is commanded by the hill on which the town
is built.  For an army, which had to submit to a siege, it was
an excellent position; but the defence of Spain, after the occupation
of the line of the Pyrenees had been neglected, could only be undertaken
in earnest behind the Ebro, and, as no secure communication
was established between Ilerda and the Ebro, and no bridge
existed over the latter stream, the retreat from the temporary
to the true defensive position was not sufficiently secured.
The Caesarians established themselves above Ilerda, in the delta
which the river Sicoris forms with the Cinga (Cinca),
which unites with it below Ilerda; but the attack only began
in earnest after Caesar had arrived in the camp (23 June).
Under the walls of the town the struggle was maintained with equal
exasperation and equal valour on both sides, and with frequent
alternations of success; but the Caesarians did not attain their object--
which was, to establish themselves between the Pompeian camp
and the town and thereby to possess themselves of the stone bridge--
and they consequently remained dependent for their communication
with Gaul solely on two bridges which they had hastily constructed
over the Sicoris, and that indeed, as the river at Ilerda itself
was too considerable to be bridged over, about eighteen
or twenty miles farther up.

Caesar Cut Off

When the floods came on with the melting of the snow,
these temporary bridges were swept away; and, as they had no vessels
for the passage of the highly swollen rivers and under such circumstance
the restoration of the bridges could not for the present be thought of,
the Caesarian army was confined to the narrow space between the Cinca
and the Sicoris, while the left bank of the Sicoris and with it the road,
by which the army communicated with Gaul and Italy, were exposed
almost undefended to the Pompeians, who passed the river partly
by the town-bridge, partly by swimming after the Lusitanian fashion
on skins.  It was the season shortly before harvest; the old produce
was almost used up, the new was not yet gathered, and the narrow stripe
of land between the two streams was soon exhausted.   In the camp
actual famine prevailed--the -modius- of wheat cost 50 -denarii-
(1 pound 16 shillings)--and dangerous diseases broke out; whereas
on the left bank there were accumulated provisions and varied supplies,
as well as troops of all sorts--reinforcements from Gaul of cavalry
and archers, officers and soldiers from furlough, foraging parties
returning--in all a mass of 6000 men, whom the Pompeians attacked
with superior force and drove with great loss to the mountains,
while the Caesarians on the right bank were obliged to remain
passive spectators of the unequal conflict.  The communications
of the army were in the hands of the Pompeians; in Italy the accounts
from Spain suddenly ceased, and the suspicious rumours,
which began to circulate there, were not so very remote from the truth.
Had the Pompeians followed up their advantage with some energy,
they could not have failed either to reduce under their power
or at least to drive back towards Gaul the mass scarcely capable
of resistance which was crowded together on the left bank
of the Sicoris, and to occupy this bank so completely that not a man
could cross the river without their knowledge.  But both points
were neglected; those bands were doubtless pushed aside with loss
but neither destroyed nor completely beaten back, and the prevention
of the crossing of the river was left substantially to the river itself,


Caesar Re-establishes the Communications

Thereupon Caesar formed his plan.  He ordered portable boats
of a light wooden frame and osier work lined with leather,
after the model of those used in the Channel among the Britons
and subsequently by the Saxons, to be prepared in the camp
and transported in waggons to the point where the bridges had stood.
On these frail barks the other bank was reached and, as it was found
unoccupied, the bridge was re-established without much difficulty;
the road in connection with it was thereupon quickly cleared,
and the eagerly-expected supplies were conveyed to the camp.
Caesar's happy idea thus rescued the army from the immense peril
in which it was placed.  Then the cavalry of Caesar which in efficiency
far surpassed that of the enemy began at once to scour the country
on the left bank of the Sicoris; the most considerable
Spanish communities between the Pyrenees and the Ebro--Osca, Tarraco,
Dertosa, and others--nay, even several to the south of the Ebro,
passed over to Caesar's side.

Retreat of the Pompeians from Ilerda

The supplies of the Pompeians were now rendered scarce
through the foraging parties of Caesar and the defection
of the neighbouring communities; they resolved at length to retire
behind the line of the Ebro, and set themselves in all haste to form
a bridge of boats over the Ebro below the mouth of the Sicoris.
Caesar sought to cut off the retreat of his opponents over the Ebro
and to detain them in Ilerda; but so long as the enemy remained
in possession of the bridge at Ilerda and he had control of neither ford
nor bridge there, he could not distribute his army over both banks
of the river and could not invest Ilerda.  His soldiers therefore
worked day and night to lower the depth of the river by means of canals
drawing off the water, so that the infantry could wade through it.
But the preparations of the Pompeians to pass the Ebro were sooner
finished than the arrangements of the Caesarians for investing Ilerda;
when the former after finishing the bridge of boats began their march
towards the Ebro along the left bank of the Sicoris, the canals
of the Caesarians seemed to the general not yet far enough advanced
to make the ford available for the infantry; he ordered
only his cavalry to pass the stream and, by clinging to the rear
of the enemy, at least to detain and harass them.

Caesar Follows

But when Caesar's legions saw in the gray morning the enemy's columns
which had been retiring since midnight, they discerned
with the sure instinct of experienced veterans the strategic importance
of this retreat, which would compel them to follow their antagonists
into distant and impracticable regions filled by hostile troops;
at their own request the general ventured to lead the infantry
also into the river, and although the water reached up
to the shoulders of the men, it was crossed without accident.
It was high time.  If the narrow plain, which separated the town
of Ilerda from the mountains enclosing the Ebro were once traversed
and the army of the Pompeians entered the mountains, their retreat
to the Ebro could no longer be prevented.  Already they had,
notwithstanding the constant attacks of the enemy's cavalry
which greatly delayed their march, approached within five miles
of the mountains, when they, having been on the march since midnight
and unspeakably exhausted, abandoned their original plan of traversing
the whole plain on the same day, and pitched their camp.
Here the infantry of Caesar overtook them and encamped opposite to them
in the evening and during the night, as the nocturnal march
which the Pompeians had at first contemplated was abandoned from fear
of the night-attacks of the cavalry.  On the following day also
both armies remained immoveable, occupied only
in reconnoitering the country.


The Route to the Ebro Closed

Early in the morning of the third day Caesar's infantry set out,
that by a movement through the pathless mountains alongside of the road
they might turn the position of the enemy and bar their route
to the Ebro.  The object of the strange march, which seemed at first
to turn back towards the camp before Ilerda, was not at once
perceived by the Pompeian officers.  When they discerned it,
they sacrificed camp and baggage and advanced by a forced march
along the highway, to gain the crest of the ridge before the Caesarians.
But it was already too late; when they came up, the compact masses
of the enemy were already posted on the highway itself.
a desperate attempt of the Pompeians to discover other routes
to the Ebro over the steep mountains was frustrated by Caesar's cavalry,
which surrounded and cut to pieces the Lusitanian troops sent forth
for that purpose.  Had a battle taken place between the Pompeian army--
which had the enemy's cavalry in its rear and their infantry in front,
and was utterly demoralized--and the Caesarians, the issue
was scarcely doubtful, and the opportunity for fighting
several times presented itself; but Caesar made no use of it,
and, not without difficulty, restrained the impatient eagerness
for the combat in his soldiers sure of victory.  The Pompeian army
was at any rate strategically lost; Caesar avoided weakening his army
and still further envenoming the bitter feud by useless bloodshed.
On the very day after he had succeeded in cutting off the Pompeians
from the Ebro, the soldiers of the two armies had begun to fraternize
and to negotiate respecting surrender; indeed the terms
asked by the Pompeians, especially as to the sparing of their officers,
had been already conceded by Caesar, when Petreius with his escort
consisting of slaves and Spaniards came upon the negotiators
and caused the Caesarians, on whom he could lay hands,
to be put to death.  Caesar nevertheless sent the Pompeians
who had come to his camp back unharmed, and persevered in seeking
a peaceful solution.  Ilerda, where the Pompeians had still
a garrison and considerable magazines, became now the point
which they sought to reach; but with the hostile army in front
and the Sicoris between them and the fortress, they marched
without coming nearer to their object.  Their cavalry became gradually
so afraid that the infantry had to take them into the centre and legions
had to be set as the rearguard; the procuring of water and forage
became more and more difficult; they had already to kill the beasts
of burden, because they could no longer feed them.  At length
the wandering army found itself formally inclosed, with the Sicoris
in its rear and the enemy's force in front, which drew rampart
and trench around it.  It attempted to cross the river, but Caesar's
German horsemen and light infantry anticipated it in the occupation
of the opposite bank.

Capitulation of the Pompeians

No bravery and no fidelity could longer avert the inevitable
capitulation (2 Aug. 705).  Caesar granted to officers and soldiers
their life and liberty, and the possession of the property
which they still retained as well as the restoration of what had been
already taken from them, the full value of which he undertook
personally to make good to his soldiers; and not only so,
but while he had compulsorily enrolled in his army the recruits
captured in Italy, he honoured these old legionaries of Pompeius
by the promise that no one should be compelled against his will
to enter Caesar's army.  He required only that each should give up
his arms and repair to his home.  Accordingly the soldiers
who were natives of Spain, about a third of the army, were disbanded
at once, while the Italian soldiers were discharged on the borders
of Transalpine and Cisalpine Gaul.

Further Spain Submits

Hither Spain on the breaking up of this army fell of itself
into the power of the victor.  In Further Spain, where Marcus Varro
held the chief command for Pompeius, it seemed to him, when he learned
the disaster of Ilerda, most advisable that he should throw himself
into the insular town of Gades and should carry thither for safety
the considerable sums which he had collected by confiscating
the treasures of the temples and the property of prominent Caesarians,
the not inconsiderable fleet which he had raised, and the two legions
entrusted to him.  But on the mere rumour of Caesar's arrival
the most notable towns of the province which had been for long
attached to Caesar declared for the latter and drove away
the Pompeian garrisons or induced them to a similar revolt;
such was the case with Corduba, Carmo, and Gades itself.
One of the legions also set out of its own accord for Hispalis,
and passed over along with this town to Caesar's side.  When at length
even Italica closed its gates against Varro, the latter
resolved to capitulate.

Siege of Massilia

About the same time Massilia also submitted.  With rare energy
the Massiliots had not merely sustained a siege, but had also kept
the sea against Caesar; it was their native element, and they might hope
to obtain vigorous support on it from Pompeius, who in fact
had the exclusive command of it.  But Caesar's lieutenant, the able
Decimus Brutus, the same who had achieved the first naval victory
in the Atlantic over the Veneti,(19) managed rapidly to equip a fleet;
and in spite of the brave resistance of the enemy's crews--
consisting partly of Albioecian mercenaries of the Massiliots,
partly of slave-herdsmen of Domitius--he vanquished by means of his brave
marines selected from the legions the stronger Massiliot fleet,
and sank or captured the greater part of their ships.  When therefore
a small Pompeian squadron under Lucius Nasidius arrived
from the east by way of Sicily and Sardinia in the port of Massilia,
the Massiliots once more renewed their naval armament and sailed forth
along with the ships of Nasidius against Brutus.  The engagement
which took place off Tauroeis (La Ciotat to the east of Marseilles)
might probably have had a different result, if the vessels of Nasidius
had fought with the same desperate courage which the Massiliots
displayed on that day; but the flight of the Nasidians
decided the victory in favour of Brutus, and the remains
of the Pompeian fleet fled to Spain.  The besieged were completely
driven from the sea.  On the landward side, where Gaius Trebonius
conducted the siege, the most resolute resistance was still continued;
but in spite of the frequent sallies of the Albioecian mercenaries
and the skilful expenditure of the immense stores of projectiles
accumulated in the city, the works of the besiegers were at length
advanced up to the walls and one of the towers fell.  The Massiliots
declared that they would give up the defence, but desired
to conclude the capitulation with Caesar himself, and entreated
the Roman commander to suspend the siege operations till
Caesar's arrival.  Trebonius had express orders from Caesar
to spare the town as far as possible; he granted the armistice desired.
But when the Massiliots made use of it for an artful sally,
in which they completely burnt the one-half of the almost unguarded
Roman works, the struggle of the siege began anew and with increased
exasperation.  The vigorous commander of the Romans repaired
with surprising rapidity the destroyed towers and the mound;
soon the Massiliots were once more completely invested.

Massilia Capitulates

When Caesar on his return from the conquest of Spain arrived
before their city, he found it reduced to extremities
partly by the enemy's attacks, partly by famine and pestilence,
and ready for the second time--on this occasion in right earnest--
to surrender on any terms.  Domitius alone, remembering the indulgence
of the victor which he had shamefully misused, embarked in a boat
and stole through the Roman fleet, to seek a third battle-field
for his implacable resentment.  Caesar's soldiers had sworn
to put to the sword the whole male population of the perfidious city,
and vehemently demanded from the general the signal for plunder.
But Caesar, mindful here also of his great task of establishing
Helleno-Italic civilization in the west, was not to be coerced
into furnishing a sequel to the destruction of Corinth.
Massilia--the most remote from the mother-country of all those cities,
once so numerous, free, and powerful, that belonged to the old Ionic
mariner-nation, and almost the last in which the Hellenic seafaring life
had preserved itself fresh and pure, as in fact it was the last
Greek city that fought at sea--Massilia had to surrender its magazines
of arms and naval stores to the victor, and lost a portion
of its territory and of its privileges; but it retained its freedom
and its nationality and continued, though with diminished proportions
in a material point of view, to be still as before intellectually
the centre of Hellenic culture in that distant Celtic country
which at this very time was attaining a new historical significance.


Expeditions of Caesar to the Corn-Provinces

While thus in the western provinces the war after various critical
vicissitudes was thoroughly decided at length in favour of Caesar,
Spain and Massilia were subdued, and the chief army of the enemy
was captured to the last man, the decision of arms had also taken place
on the second arena of warfare, on which Caesar had found it necessary
immediately after the conquest of Italy to assume the offensive


Sardinia Occupied
Sicily Occupied

We have already mentioned that the Pompeians intended
to reduce Italy to starvation.  They had the means of doing so
in their hands.  They had thorough command of the sea and laboured
with great zeal everywhere--in Gades, Utica, Messana, above all
in the east--to increase their fleet.  They held moreover
all the provinces, from which the capital drew its means of subsistence:
Sardinia and Corsica through Marcus Cotta, Sicily through Marcus Cato,
Africa through the self-nominated commander-in-chief Titus Attius Varus
and their ally Juba king of Numidia It was indispensably needful
for Caesar to thwart these plans of the enemy and to wrest from them
the corn-provinces.  Quintus Valerius was sent with a legion to Sardinia
and compelled the Pompeian governor to evacuate the island.
The more important enterprise of taking Sicily and Africa from the enemy
was entrusted to the young Gaius Curio with the assistance
of the able Gaius Caninius Rebilus, who possessed experience in war.
Sicily was occupied by him without a blow; Cato, without a proper army
and not a man of the sword, evacuated the island, after having
in his straightforward manner previously warned the Siceliots
not to compromise themselves uselessly by an ineffectual resistance.

Landing of Curio in Africa

Curio left behind half of his troops to protect this island
so important for the capital, and embarked with the other half--
two legions and 500 horsemen--for Africa.  Here he might expect
to encounter more serious resistance; besides the considerable
and in its own fashion efficient army of Juba, the governor Varus
had formed two legions from the Romans settled in Africa
and also fitted out a small squadron of ten sail.  With the aid
of his superior fleet, however, Curio effected without difficulty
a landing between Hadrumetum, where the one legion of the enemy
lay along with their ships of war, and Utica, in front of which town
lay the second legion under Varus himself.  Curio turned against
the latter, and pitched his camp not far from Utica, just where
a century and a half before the elder Scipio had taken up
his first winter-camp in Africa.(20)  Caesar, compelled to keep together
his best troops for the Spanish war, had been obliged to make up
the Sicilo-African army for the most part out of the legions taken over
from the enemy, more especially the war-prisoners of Corfinium;
the officers of the Pompeian army in Africa, some of whom had served
in the very legions that were conquered at Corfinium,
now left no means untried to bring back their old soldiers who were
now fighting against them to their first allegiance.  But Caesar
had not erred in the choice of his lieutenant. Curio knew as well
how to direct the movements of the army and of the fleet,
as how to acquire personal influence over the soldiers;
the supplies were abundant, the conflicts without exception successful.

Curio Conquers at Utica

When Varus, presuming that the troops of Curio wanted opportunity
to pass over to his side, resolved to give battle chiefly for the sake
of affording them this opportunity, the result did not justify
his expectations.  Animated by the fiery appeal of their youthful leader
the cavalry of Curio put to flight the horsemen  of the enemy
and in presence of the two armies cut down also the light infantry
which had accompanied the horsemen; and emboldened by this success
and by Curio's personal example, his legions advanced through
the difficult ravine separating the two lines to the attack,
for which the Pompeians however did not wait, but disgracefully
fled back to their camp and evacuated even this in the ensuing night.
The victory was so complete that Curio at once took steps
to besiege Utica.  When news arrived, however, that king Juba
was advancing with all his forces to its relief, Curio resolved,
just as Scipio had done on the arrival of Syphax, to raise the siege
and to return to Scipio's former camp till reinforcements
should arrive from Sicily.  Soon afterwards came a second report,
that king Juba had been induced by the attacks of neighbouring princes
to turn back with his main force and was sending to the aid
of the besieged merely a moderate corps under Saburra.
Curio, who from his lively temperament had only with great reluctance
made up his mind to rest, now set out again at once to fight with Saburra
before he could enter into communication with the garrison of Utica.

Curio Defeated by Juba on the Bagradas
Death of Curio

His cavalry, which had gone forward in the evening, actually succeeded
in surprising the corps of Saburra on the Bagradas during the night
and inflicting much damage upon it; and on the news of this victory
Curio hastened the march of the infantry, in order by their means
to complete the defeat Soon they perceived on the last slopes
of the heights that sank towards the Bagradas the corps of Saburra,
which was skirmishing with the Roman horsemen; the legions
coming up helped to drive it completely down into the plain.
But here the combat changed its aspect.  Saburra was not,
as they supposed, destitute of support; on the contrary he was
not much more than five miles distant from the Numidian main force.
Already the flower of the Numidian infantry and 2000 Gallic
and Spanish horsemen had arrived on the field of battle
to support Saburra, and the king in person with the bulk of the army
and sixteen elephants was approaching.  After the nocturnal march
and the hot conflict there were at the moment not more than 200
of the Roman cavalry together, and these as well as the infantry,
extremely exhausted by fatigue and fighting, were all surrounded,
in the wide plain into which they had allowed themselves to be allured,
by the continually increasing hosts of the enemy.  Vainly Curio
endeavoured to engage in close combat; the Libyan horsemen retreated,
as they were wont, so soon as a Roman division advanced,
only to pursue it when it turned.  In vain he attempted
to regain the heights; they were occupied and foreclosed
by the enemy's horse.  All was lost.  The infantry was cut down
to the last man.  Of the cavalry a few succeeded in cutting
their way through; Curio too might have probably saved himself,
but he could not bear to appear alone before his master
without the army entrusted to him, and died sword in hand.
Even the force which was collected in the camp before Utica,
and that which guarded the fleet--which might so easily
have escaped to Sicily--surrendered under the impression made
by the fearfully rapid catastrophe on the following day
to Varus (Aug. or Sept. 705).

So ended the expedition arranged by Caesar to Sicily and Africa.
It attained its object so far, since by the occupation of Sicily
in connection with that of Sardinia at least the most urgent wants
of the capital were relieved; the miscarriage of the conquest of Africa--
from which the victorious party drew no farther substantial gain--
and the loss of two untrustworthy legions might be got over.
But the early death of Curio was an irreparable loss for Caesar,
and indeed for Rome.  Not without reason had Caesar entrusted
the most important independent command to this young man, although
he had no military experience and was notorious for his dissolute life;
there was a spark of Caesar's own spirit in the fiery youth.
He resembled Caesar, inasmuch as he too had drained the cup of pleasure
to the dregs; inasmuch as he did not become a statesman
because he was an officer, but on the contrary it was his political
action that placed the sword in his hands; inasmuch as
his eloquence was not that of rounded periods, but the eloquence
of deeply-felt thought; inasmuch as his mode of warfare was based
on rapid action with slight means; inasmuch as his character
was marked by levity and often by frivolity, by pleasant frankness
and thorough life in the moment.  If, as his general says of him,
youthful fire and high courage carried him into incautious acts,
and if he too proudly accepted death that he might not submit
to be pardoned for a pardonable fault, traits of similar imprudence
and similar pride are not wanting in Caesar's history also.
We may regret that this exuberant nature was not permitted to work off
its follies and to preserve itself for the following generation
so miserably poor in talents, and so rapidly falling a prey
to the dreadful rule of mediocrities.

Pompeius' Plan of Campaign for 705

How far these events of the war in 705 interfered with Pompeius'
general plan for the campaign, and particularly what part, in that plan
was assigned after the loss of Italy to the important military corps
in the west, can only be determined by conjecture.  That Pompeius
had the intention of coming by way of Africa and Mauretania
to the aid of his army fighting in Spain, was simply a romantic,
and beyond doubt altogether groundless, rumour circulating
in the camp of Ilerda.  It is much more likely that he still kept
by his earlier plan of attacking Caesar from both sides in Transalpine
and Cisalpine Gaul(21) even after the loss of Italy, and meditated
a combined attack at once from Spain and Macedonia.  It may be presumed
that the Spanish army was meant to remain on the defensive
at the Pyrenees till the Macedonian army in the course of organization
was likewise ready to march; whereupon both would then have started
simultaneously and effected a junction according to circumstances
either on the Rhone or on the Po, while the fleet, it may be conjectured,
would have attempted at the same time to reconquer Italy proper.
On this supposition apparently Caesar had first prepared himself
to meet an attack on Italy. One of the ablest of his officers,
the tribune of the people Marcus Antonius, commanded there
with propraetorian powers.  The southeastern ports--Sipus,
Brundisium, Tarentum--where an attempt at landing was first
to be expected, had received a garrison of three legions.  Besides
this Quintus Hortensius, the degenerate son of the well-known orator,
collected a fleet in the Tyrrhene Sea, and Publius Dolabella
a second fleet in the Adriatic, which were to be employed
partly to support the defence, partly to transport the intended
expedition to Greece.  In the event of Pompeius attempting
to penetrate by land into Italy, Marcus Licinius Crassus,
the eldest son of the old colleague of Caesar, was to conduct
the defence of Cisalpine Gaul, Gaius the younger brother
of Marcus Antonius that of Illyricum.

Caesar's Fleet and Army in Illyricum Destroyed

But the expected attack was long in coming.  It was not
till the height of summer that the conflict began in Illyria.
There Caesar's lieutenant Gaius Antonius with his two legions
lay in the island of Curicta (Veglia in the gulf of Quarnero),
and Caesar's admiral Publius Dolabella with forty ships
lay in the narrow arm of the sea between this island and the mainland.
The admirals of Pompeius in the Adriatic, Marcus Octavius with the Greek,
Lucius Scribonius Libo with the Illyrian division of the fleet,
attacked the squadron of Dolabella, destroyed all his ships,
and cut off Antonius on his island.  To rescue him, a corps under Basilus
and Sallustius came from Italy and the squadron of Hortensius
from the Tyrrhene Sea; but neither the former nor the latter were able
to effect anything in presence of the far superior fleet of the enemy.
The legions of Antonius had to be abandoned to their fate.
Provisions came to an end, the troops became troublesome and mutinous;
with the exception of a few divisions, which succeeded in reaching
the mainland on rafts, the corps, still fifteen cohorts strong, laid down
their arms and were conveyed in the vessels of Libo to Macedonia
to be there incorporated with the Pompeian army, while Octavius was left
to complete the subjugation of the Illyrian coast now denuded of troops.
The Dalmatae, now far the most powerful tribe in these regions,(22)
the important insular town of Issa (Lissa), and other townships,
embraced the party of Pompeius; but the adherents of Caesar
maintained themselves in Salonae (Spalato) and Lissus (Alessio),
and in the former town not merely sustained with courage a siege,
but when they were reduced to extremities, made a sally with such effect
that Octavius raised the siege and sailed off to Dyrrhachium
to pass the winter there.

Result of the Campaign as a Whole

The success achieved in Illyricum by the Pompeian fleet,
although of itself not inconsiderable, had yet but little influence
on the issue of the campaign as a whole; and it appears miserably small,
when we consider that the performances of the land and naval' forces
under the supreme command of Pompeius during the whole eventful year 705
were confined to this single feat of arms, and that from the east,
where the general, the senate, the second great army, the principal fleet,
the immense military and still more extensive financial resources
of the antagonists of Caesar were united, no intervention at all
took place where it was needed in that all-decisive struggle in the west.
The scattered condition of the forces in the eastern half of the empire,
the method of the general never to operate except with superior masses,
his cumbrous and tedious movements, and the discord of the coalition
may perhaps explain in some measure, though not excuse, the inactivity
of the land-force; but that the fleet, which commanded the Mediterranean
without a rival, should have thus done nothing to influence
the course of affairs--nothing for Spain, next to nothing
for the faithful Massiliots, nothing to defend Sardinia, Sicily,
Africa, or, if not to reoccupy Italy, at least to obstruct its supplies--
this makes demands on our ideas of the confusion and perversity
prevailing in the Pompeian camp, which we can only with difficulty meet.

The aggregate result of this campaign was corresponding.
Caesar's double aggressive movement, against Spain and against Sicily
and Africa, was successful, in the former case completely,
in the latter at least partially; while Pompeius' plan
of starving Italy was thwarted in the main by the taking away
of Sicily, and his general plan of campaign was frustrated completely
by the destruction of the Spanish army; and in Italy only
a very small portion of Caesar's defensive arrangements
had come to be applied.  Notwithstanding the painfully-felt losses
in Africa and Illyria, Caesar came forth from this first year
of the war in the most decided and most decisive manner as victor.

Organizations in Macedonia
The Emigrants

If, however, nothing material was done from the east to obstruct Caesar
in the subjugation of the west, efforts at least were made towards
securing political and military consolidation there during the respite
so ignominiously obtained.  The great rendezvous of the opponents
of Caesar was Macedonia.  Thither Pompeius himself and the mass
of the emigrants from Brundisium resorted; thither came
the other refugees from the west: Marcus Cato from Sicily,
Lucius Domitius from Massilia but more especially a number
of the best officers and soldiers of the broken-up army of Spain,
with its generals Afranius and Varro at their head.  In Italy
emigration gradually became among the aristocrats a question
not of honour merely but almost of fashion, and it obtained
a fresh impulse through the unfavourable accounts which arrived
regarding Caesar's position before Ilerda; not a few of the more
lukewarm partisans and the political trimmers went over by degrees,
and even Marcus Cicero at last persuaded himself that he did not
adequately discharge his duty as a citizen by writing a dissertatio
on concord.  The senate of emigrants at Thessalonica, where the official
Rome pitched its interim abode, numbered nearly 200 members
including many venerable old men and almost all the consulars.
But emigrants indeed they were.  This Roman Coblentz displayed
a pitiful spectacle in the high pretensions and paltry performances
of the genteel world of Rome, their unseasonable reminiscences
and still more unseasonable recriminations, their political
perversities and financial embarrassments.  It was a matter
of comparatively slight moment that, while the old structure
was falling to pieces, they were with the most painstaking gravity
watching over every old ornamental scroll and every speck of rust
in the constitution; after all it was simply ridiculous,
when the genteel lords had scruples of conscience as to calling
their deliberative assembly beyond the sacred soil of the city
the senate, and cautiously gave it the title of the "three hundred";(23)
or when they instituted tedious investigations in state law
as to whether and how a curiate law could be legitimately enacted
elsewhere than within the ring-wall of Rome.

The Lukewarm

Far worse traits were the indifference of the lukewarm
and the narrow-minded stubbornness of the ultras.  The former
could not be brought to act or even to keep silence.  If they were asked
to exert themselves in some definite way for the common good,
with the inconsistency characteristic of weak people they regarded
any such suggestion as a malicious attempt to compromise them
still further, and either did not do what they were ordered at all
or did it with half heart.  At the same time of course,
with their affectation of knowing better when it was too late
and their over-wise impracticabilities, they proved a perpetual clog
to those who were acting; their daily work consisted in criticizing,
ridiculing, and bemoaning every occurrence great and small,
and in unnerving and discouraging the multitude by their own
sluggishness and hopelessness.

The Ultras

While these displayed the utter prostration of weakness, the ultras
on the other hand exhibited in full display its exaggerated action.
With them there was no attempt to conceal that the preliminary
to any negotiation for peace was the bringing over of Caesar's head;
every one of the attempts towards peace, which Caesar repeatedly made
even now, was tossed aside without being examined, or employed
only to cover insidious attempts on the lives of the commissioners
of their opponent.  That the declared partisans of Caesar
had jointly and severally forfeited life and property, was a matter
of course; but it fared little better with those more or less neutral.
Lucius Domitius, the hero of Corfinium, gravely proposed
in the council of war that those senators who had fought in the army
of Pompeius should come to a vote on all who had either remained neutral
or had emigrated but not entered the army, and should according
to their own pleasure individually acquit them or punish them
by fine or even by the forfeiture of life and property.
Another of these ultras formally lodged with Pompeius a charge
of corruption and treason against Lucius Afranius for his defective
defence of Spain.  Among these deep-dyed republicans their
political theory assumed almost the character of a confession
of religious faith; they accordingly hated their own more lukewarm
partisans and Pompeius with his personal adherents, if possible,
still more than their open opponents, and that with all the dull
obstinacy of hatred which is wont to characterize orthodox theologians;
and they were mainly to blame for the numberless and bitter
separate quarrels which distracted the emigrant army and emigrant senate.
But they did not confine themselves to words. Marcus Bibulus,
Titus Labienus, and others of this coterie carried out their theory
in practice, and caused such officers or soldiers of Caesar's army
as fell into their hands to be executed en masse; which,
as may well be conceived, did not tend to make Caesar's troops
fight with less energy.  If the counterrevolution in favour
of the friends of the constitution, for which all the elements
were in existence,(24) did not break out in Italy during
Caesar's absence, the reason, according to the assurance
of discerning opponents of Caesar, lay chiefly in the general dread
of the unbridled fury of the republican ultras after the restoration
should have taken place.  The better men in the Pompeian camp
were in despair over this frantic behaviour.  Pompeius, himself
a brave soldier, spared the prisoners as far as he might and could;
but he was too pusillanimous and in too awkward a position to prevent
or even to punish all atrocities of this sort, as it became him
as commander-in-chief to do.  Marcus Cato, the only man who at least
carried moral consistency into the struggle, attempted with more energy
to check such proceedings; he induced the emigrant senate
to prohibit by a special decree the pillage of subject towns
and the putting to death of a burgess otherwise than in battle.
The able Marcus Marcellus had similar views.  No one, indeed,
knew better than Cato and Marcellus that the extreme party
would carry out their saving deeds, if necessary, in defiance
of all decrees of the senate.  But if even now, when they had still
to regard considerations of prudence, the rage of the ultras
could not be tamed, people might prepare themselves after the victory
for a reign of terror from which Marius and Sulla themselves
would have turned away with horror; and we can understand why Cato,
according to his own confession, was more afraid of the victory
than of the defeat of his own party.

The Preparations for War

The management of the military preparations in the Macedonian camp
was in the hands of Pompeius the commander-in-chief.  His position,
always troublesome and galling, had become still worse through
the unfortunate events of 705.  In the eyes of his partisans he was
mainly to blame for this result.  This judgment was in various respects
not just.  A considerable part of the misfortunes endured
was to be laid to the account of the perversity and insubordination
of the lieutenant-generals, especially of the consul Lentulus
and Lucius Domitius; from the moment when Pompeius took the head
of the army, he had led it with skill and courage, and had saved
at least very considerable forces from the shipwreck; that he was
not a match for Caesar's altogether superior genius, which was now
recognized by all, could not be fairly made matter of reproach to him.
But the result alone decided men's judgment.  Trusting to the general
Pompeius, the constitutional party had broken with Caesar; the pernicious
consequences of this breach recoiled upon the general Pompeius;
and, though owing to the notorious military incapacity
of all the other chiefs no attempt was made to change the supreme
command yet confidence at any rate in the commander-in-chief
was paralyzed.  To these painful consequences of the defeats endured
were added the injurious influences of the emigration.
Among the refugees who arrived there were certainly a number
of efficient soldiers and capable officers, especially those
belonging to the former Spanish army; but the number of those
who came to serve and fight was just as small as that of the generals
of quality who called themselves proconsuls and imperators
with as good title as Pompeius, and of the genteel lords
who took part in active military service more or less reluctantly,
was alarmingly great.  Through these the mode of life in the capital
was introduced into the camp, not at all to the advantage of the army;
the tents of such grandees were graceful bowers, the ground
elegantly covered with fresh turf, the walls clothed with ivy;
silver plate stood on the table, and the wine-cup often circulated
there even in broad daylight.  Those fashionable warriors formed
a singular contrast with Caesar's daredevils, who ate coarse bread
from which the former recoiled, and who, when that failed, devoured
even roots and swore that they would rather chew the bark of trees
than desist from the enemy.  While, moreover, the action
of Pompeius was hampered by the necessity of having regard
to the authority of a collegiate board personally disinclined to him,
this embarrassment was singularly increased when the senate of emigrants
took up its abode almost in his very headquarters and all the venom
of the emigrants now found vent in these senatorial sittings.
Lastly there was nowhere any man of mark, who could have thrown
his own weight into the scale against all these preposterous doings.
Pompeius himself was intellectually far too secondary for that purpose,
and far too hesitating, awkward, and reserved.  Marcus Cato
would have had at least the requisite moral authority, and would not
have lacked the good will to support Pompeius with it; but Pompeius,
instead of calling him to his assistance, out of distrustful
jealousy kept him in the background, and preferred for instance
to commit the highly important chief command of the fleet
to the in every respect incapable Marcus Bibulus rather than to Cato.


The Legions of Pompeius

While Pompeius thus treated the political aspect of his position
with his characteristic perversity, and did his best to make
what was already bad in itself still worse, he devoted himself
on the other hand with commendable zeal to his duty of giving military
organization to the considerable but scattered forces of his party.
The flower of his force was composed of the troops brought with him
from Italy, out of which with the supplementary aid of the Illyrian
prisoners of war and the Romans domiciled in Greece five legions
in all were formed.  Three others came from the east--the two Syrian
legions formed from the remains of the army of Crassus, and one made up
out of the two weak legions hitherto stationed in Cilicia.
Nothing stood in the way of the withdrawal of these corps of occupation:
because on the one hand the Pompeians had an understanding
with the Parthians, and might even have had an alliance with them
if Pompeius had not indignantly refused to pay them the price
which they demanded for it--the cession of the Syrian province
added by himself to the empire; and on the other hand
Caesar's plan of despatching two legions to Syria, and inducing
the Jews once more to take up arms by means of the prince Aristobulus
kept a prisoner in Rome, was frustrated partly by other causes,
partly by the death of Aristobulus.  New legions were moreover raised--
one from the veteran soldiers settled in Crete and Macedonia,
two from the Romans of Asia Minor.  To all these fell to be added
2000 volunteers, who were derived from the remains of the Spanish
select corps and other similar sources; and, lastly, the contingents
of the subjects.  Pompeius like Caesar had disdained to make
requisitions of infantry from them; only the Epirot, Aetolian,
and Thracian militia were called out to guard the coast, and moreover
3000 archers from Greece and Asia Minor and 1200 slingers
were taken up as light troops.

His Cavalry

The cavalry on the other hand--with the exception of a noble guard,
more respectable than militarily important, formed from the young
aristocracy of Rome, and of the Apulian slave-herdsmen whom Pompeius
had mounted (25)--consisted exclusively of the contingents
of the subjects and clients of Rome.  The flower of it consisted
of the Celts, partly from the garrison of Alexandria,(26)
partly the contingents of king Deiotarus who in spite of his great age
had appeared in person at the head of his troops, and of the other
Galatian dynasts.  With them were associated the excellent Thracian
horsemen, who were partly brought up by their princes Sadala
and Rhascuporis, partly enlisted by Pompeius in the Macedonian province;
the Cappadocian cavalry; the mounted archers sent by Antiochus
king of Commagene; the contingents of the Armenians from the west side
of the Euphrates under Taxiles, and from the other side under Megabates,
and the Numidian bands sent by king Juba--the whole body amounted
to 7000 horsemen.

Fleet

Lastly the fleet of Pompeius was very considerable.  It was formed
partly of the Roman transports brought from Brundisium
or subsequently built, partly of the war vessels of the king of Egypt,
of the Colchian princes, of the Cilician dynast Tarcondimotus,
of the cities of Tyre, Rhodes, Athens, Corcyra, and generally
of all the Asiatic and Greek maritime states; and it numbered nearly
500 sail, of which the Roman vessels formed a fifth.  Immense magazines
of corn and military stores were accumulated in Dyrrhachium.
The war-chest was well filled, for the Pompeians found themselves
in possession of the principal sources of the public revenue
and turned to their own account the moneyed resources of the client-
princes, of the senators of distinction, of the farmers of the taxes,
and generally of the whole Roman and non-Roman population
within their reach.  Every appliance that the reputation
of the legitimate government and the much-renowned protectorship
of Pompeius over kings and peoples could move in Africa, Egypt,
Macedonia, Greece, Western Asia and Syria, had been put in motion
for the protection of the Roman republic; the report which circulated
in Italy that Pompeius was arming the Getae, Colchians,
and Armenians against Rome, and the designation of "king of kings"
given to Pompeius in the camp, could hardly be called exaggerations.
On the whole he had command over an army of 7000 cavalry
and eleven legions, of which it is true, but five at the most
could be described as accustomed to war, and over a fleet of 500 sail.
The temper of the soldiers, for whose provisioning and pay Pompeius
manifested adequate care, and to whom in the event of victory the most
abundant rewards were promised, was throughout good, in several--
and these precisely the most efficient--divisions even excellent
but a great part of the army consisted of newly-raised troops,
the formation and training of which, however zealously it was prosecuted,
necessarily required time.  The force altogether was imposing,
but at the same time of a somewhat motley character.

Junction of the Pompeians on the Coast of Epirus

According to the design of the commander-in-chief the army and fleet
were to be in substance completely united by the winter of 705-706
along the coast and in the waters of Epirus.  The admiral Bibulus
had already arrived with no ships at his new headquarters, Corcyra.
On the other hand the land-army, the headquarters of which had been
during the summer at Berrhoea on the Haliacmon, had not yet come up;
the mass of it was moving slowly along the great highway
from Thessalonica towards the west coast to the future headquarters
Dyrrhachium; the two legions, which Metellus Scipio was bringing up
from Syria, remained at Pergamus in Asia for winter quarters
and were expected in Europe only towards spring.  They were taking time
in fact for their movements. For the moment the ports of Epirus
were guarded, over and above the fleet, merely by their own
civic defences and the levies of the adjoining districts.

Caesar against Pompeius

It thus remained possible for Caesar, notwithstanding the intervention
of the Spanish war, to assume the offensive also in Macedonia;
and he at least was not slow to act.  He had long ago ordered
the collection of vessels of war and transports in Brundisium,
and after the capitulation of the Spanish army and the fall
of Massilia had directed the greater portion of the select troops
employed there to proceed to that destination. The unparalleled
exertions no doubt, which were thus required by Caesar
from his soldiers, thinned the ranks more than their conflicts had done
and the mutiny of one of the four oldest legions, the ninth
on its march through Placentia was a dangerous indication
of the temper prevailing in the army; but Caesar's presence of mind
and personal authority gained the mastery, and from this quarter
nothing impeded the embarkation.  But the want of ships, through which
the pursuit of Pompeius had failed in March 705, threatened also
to frustrate this expedition.  The war-vessels, which Caesar
had given orders to build in the Gallic, Sicilian, and Italian ports,
were not yet ready or at any rate not on the spot; his squadron
in the Adriatic had been in the previous year destroyed at Curicta;(27)
he found at Brundisium not more than twelve ships of war
and scarcely transports enough to convey over at once the third part
of his army--of twelve legions and 10,000 cavalry--destined for Greece.
The considerable fleet of the enemy exclusively commanded
the Adriatic and especially all the harbours of the mainland
and islands on its eastern coast.  Under such circumstances
the question presents itself, why Caesar did not instead
of the maritime route choose the land route through Illyria,
which relieved him from all the perils threatened by the fleet
and besides was shorter for his troops, who mostly came from Gaul,
than the route by Brundisium.  It is true that the regions
of Illyria were rugged and poor beyond description; but they
were traversed by other armies not long afterwards, and this obstacle
can hardly have appeared insurmountable to the conqueror of Gaul.
Perhaps he apprehended that during the troublesome march
through Illyria Pompeius might convey his whole force over the Adriatic,
whereby their parts might come at once to be changed--with Caesar
in Macedonia, and Pompeius in Italy; although such a rapid change
was scarcely to be expected from his slow-moving antagonist.
Perhaps Caesar had decided for the maritime route on the supposition
that his fleet would meanwhile be brought into a condition
to command respect, and, when after his return from Spain
he became aware of the true state of things in the Adriatic,
it might be too late to change the plan of campaign.  Perhaps--
and, in accordance with Caesar's quick temperament always urging him
to decision, we may even say in all probability--he found himself
irresistibly tempted by the circumstance that the Epirot coast
was still at the moment unoccupied but would certainly be covered
in a few days by the enemy, to thwart once more by a bold stroke
the whole plan of his antagonist.

Caesar Lands in Epirus
First Successes

However this may be, on the 4th Jan. 706(28) Caesar set sail
with six legions greatly thinned by toil and sickness and 600 horsemen
from Brundisium for the coast of Epirus.  It was a counterpart
to the foolhardy Britannic expedition; but at least the first throw
was fortunate.  The coast was reached in the middle of the Acroceraunian
(Chimara) cliffs, at the little-frequented  roadstead of Paleassa
(Paljassa).  The transports were seen both from the harbour of Oricum
(creek of Avlona) where a Pompeian squadron of eighteen sail was lying,
and from the headquarters of the hostile fleet at Corcyra;
but in the one quarter they deemed themselves too weak,
in the other they were not ready to sail, so that the first freight
was landed without hindrance.  While the vessels at once returned
to bring over the second, Caesar on that same evening scaled
the Acroceraunian mountains.  His first successes were as great
as the surprise of his enemies.  The Epirot militia nowhere
offered resistance; the important seaport towns of Oricum
and Apollonia along with a number of smaller townships were taken,
and Dyrrhachium, selected by the Pompeians as their chief arsenal
and filled with stores of all sorts, but only feebly garrisoned,
was in the utmost danger.

Caesar Cut Off from Italy

But the further course of the campaign did not correspond
to this brilliant beginning.  Bibulus subsequently made up in some measure
for the negligence, of which he had allowed himself to be guilty,
by redoubling his exertions.  He not only captured nearly thirty
of the transports returning home, and caused them with every living
thing on board to be burnt, but he also established along
the whole district of coast occupied by Caesar, from the island Sason
(Saseno) as far as the ports of Corcyra, a most careful watch,
however troublesome it was rendered by the inclement season
of the year and the necessity of bringing everything necessary
for the guard-ships, even wood and water, from Corcyra; in fact
his successor Libo--for he himself soon succumbed to the unwonted
fatigues--even blockaded for a time the port of Brundisium,
till the want of water again dislodged him from the little island
in front of it on which he had established himself.  It was
not possible for Caesar's officers to convey the second portion
of the army over to their general.  As little did he himself
succeed in the capture of Dyrrhachium.  Pompeius learned through
one of Caesar's peace envoys as to his preparations for the voyage
to the Epirot coast, and, thereupon accelerating his march,
threw himself just at the right time into that important arsenal.
The situation of Caesar was critical.  Although he extended his range
in Epirus as far as with his slight strength was at all possible,
the subsistence of his army remained difficult and precarious,
while the enemy, in possession of the magazines of Dyrrhachium
and masters of the sea, had abundance of everything.  With his army
presumably little above 20,000 strong he could not offer battle
to that of Pompeius at least twice as numerous, but had to deem himself
fortunate that Pompeius went methodically to work and, instead
of immediately forcing a battle, took up his winter quarters
between Dyrrhachium and Apollonia on the right bank of the Apsus,
facing Caesar on the left, in order that after the arrival
of the legions from Pergamus in the spring he might annihilate
the enemy with an irresistibly superior force.  Thus months passed.
If the arrival of the better season, which brought to the enemy
a strong additional force and the free use of his fleet, found Caesar
still in the same position, he was to all appearance lost,
with his weak band wedged in among the rocks of Epirus between
the immense fleet and the three times superior land army of the enemy;
and already the winter was drawing to a close.  His sole hope
still depended on the transport fleet; that it should steal
or fight its way through the blockade was hardly to be hoped for;
but after the first voluntary foolhardiness this second venture
was enjoined by necessity.  How desperate his situation appeared
to Caesar himself, is shown by his resolution--when the fleet
still came not--to sail alone in a fisherman's boat across the Adriatic
to Brundisium in order to fetch it; which, in reality, was only abandoned
because no mariner was found to undertake the daring voyage.

Antonius Proceed to Epirus

But his appearance in person was not needed to induce
the faithful officer who commanded in Italy, Marcus Antonius,
to make this last effort for the saving of his master. Once more
the transport fleet, with four legions and 800 horsemen on board
sailed from the harbour of Brundisium, and fortunately a strong
south wind carried it past Libo's galleys.  But the same wind,
which thus saved the fleet, rendered it impossible for it to land
as it was directed on the coast of Apollonia, and compelled it
to sail past the camps of Caesar and Pompeius and to steer
to the north of Dyrrhachium towards Lissus, which town
fortunately still adhered to Caesar.(29)  When it sailed
past the harbour of Dyrrhachium, the Rhodian galleys started
in pursuit, and hardly had the ships of Antonius entered
the port of Lissus when the enemy's squadron appeared before it.
But just at this moment the wind suddenly veered, and drove
the pursuing galleys back into the open sea and partly
on the rocky coast.  Through the most marvellous good fortune
the landing of the second freight had also been successful.

Junction of Caesar's Army

Antonius and Caesar were no doubt still some four days' march
from each other, separated by Dyrrhachium and the whole army
of the enemy; but Antonius happily effected the perilous march
round about Dyrrhachium through the passes of the Graba Balkan,
and was received by Caesar, who had gone to meet him, on the right bank
of the Apsus.  Pompeius, after having vainly attempted to prevent
the junction of the two armies of the enemy and to force the corps
of Antonius to fight by itself, took up a new position at Asparagium
on the river Genusus (Skumbi), which flows parallel to the Apsus
between the latter and the town of Dyrrhachium, and here remained
once more immoveable.  Caesar felt himself now strong enough
to give battle; but Pompeius declined it.  On the other hand Caesar
succeeded in deceiving his adversary and throwing himself unawares
with his better marching troops, just as at Ilerda, between
the enemy's camp and the fortress of Dyrrhachium on which it rested
as a basis.  The chain of the Graba Balkan, which stretching
in a direction from east to west ends on the Adriatic
in the narrow tongue of land at Dyrrhachium, sends off--fourteen miles
to the east of Dyrrhachium--in a south-westerly direction a lateral
branch which likewise turns in the form of a crescent towards the sea,
and the main chain and lateral branch of the mountains enclose
between themselves a small plain extending round a cliff on the seashore.

Pompeius now took up his camp, and, although Caesar's army kept
the land route to Dyrrhachium closed against him, he yet with the aid
of his fleet remained constantly in communication with the town
and was amply and easily provided from it with everything needful;
while among the Caesarians, notwithstanding strong detachments
to the country lying behind, and notwithstanding all the exertions
of the general to bring about an organized system of conveyance
and thereby a regular supply, there was more than scarcity, and flesh,
barley, nay even roots had very frequently to take the place
of the wheat to which they were accustomed.

Caesar Invests the Camp of Pompeius

As his phlegmatic opponent persevered in his inaction, Caesar
undertook to occupy the circle of heights which enclosed the plain
on the shore held by Pompeius, with the view of being able at least
to arrest the movements of the superior cavalry of the enemy
and to operate with more freedom against Dyrrhachium, and if possible
to compel his opponent either to battle or to embarkation.  Nearly
the half of Caesar's troops was detached to the interior;
it seemed almost Quixotic to propose with the rest virtually
to besiege an army perhaps twice as strong, concentrated in position,
and resting on the sea and the fleet.  Yet Caesar's veterans by infinite
exertions invested the Pompeian camp with a chain of posts
sixteen miles long, and afterwards added, just as before Alesia,
to this inner line a second outer one, to protect themselves
against attacks from Dyrrhachium and against attempts to turn
their position which could so easily be executed with the aid
of the fleet.  Pompeius attacked more than once portions
of these entrenchments with a view to break if possible the enemy's line,
but he did not attempt to prevent the investment by a battle;
he preferred to construct in his turn a number of entrenchments
around his camp, and to connect them with one another by lines.
Both sides exerted themselves to push forward their trenches
as far as possible, and the earthworks advanced but slowly amidst
constant conflicts.  At the same time skirmishing went on
on the opposite side of Caesar's camp with the garrison of Dyrrhachium;
Caesar hoped to get the fortress into his power by means
of an understanding with some of its inmates, but was prevented
by the enemy's fleet.  There was incessant fighting at very different
points--on one of the hottest days at six places simultaneously--
and, as a rule, the tried valour of the Caesarians had the advantage
in these skirmishes; once, for instance, a single cohort
maintained itself in its entrenchments against four legions
for several hours, till support came up.  No prominent success
was attained on either side; yet the effects of the investment came
by degrees to be oppressively felt by the Pompeians.  The stopping
of the rivulets flowing from the heights into the plain compelled them
to be content with scanty and bad well-water.  Still more severely felt
was the want of fodder for the beasts of burden and the horses,
which the fleet was unable adequately to remedy; numbers of them died,
and it was of but little avail that the horses were conveyed by the fleet
to Dyrrhachium, because there also they did not find sufficient fodder.

Caesar's Lines Broken
Caesar Once More Defeated

Pompeius could not much longer delay to free himself
from his disagreeable position by a blow struck against the enemy.
He was informed by Celtic deserters that the enemy had neglected
to secure the beach between his two chains of entrenchments
600 feet distant from each other by a cross-wall, and on this
he formed his plan.  While he caused the inner line of Caesar's
entrenchments to be attacked by the legions from the camp,
and the outer line by the light troops placed in vessels
and landed beyond the enemy's entrenchments, a third division
landed in the space left between the two lines and attacked
in the rear their already sufficiently occupied defenders.
The entrenchment next to the sea was taken, and the garrison fled
in wild confusion; with difficulty the commander of the next trench
Marcus Antonius succeeded in maintaining it and in setting
a limit for the moment to the advance of the Pompeians; but;
apart from the considerable loss, the outermost entrenchment
along the sea remained in the hands of the Pompeians and the lin
was broken through.  Caesar the more  eagerly seized the opportunity,
which soon after presented itself, of attacking a Pompeian legion,
which had incautiously become isolated, with the bulk
of his infantry.  But the attacked offered valiant resistance,
and, as the ground on which the fight took place had been several times
employed for the encampment of larger and lesser divisions
and was intersected in various directions by mounds and ditches,
Caesar's right wing along with the cavalry entirely missed its way;
instead of supporting the left in attacking the Pompeian legion,
it got into a narrow trench that led from one of the old camps
towards the river.  So Pompeius, who came up in all haste
with five legions to the aid of his troops, found the two wings
of the enemy separated from each other, and one of them
in an utterly forlorn position.  When the Caesarians saw him advance,
a panic seized them; the whole plunged into disorderly flight;
and, if the matter ended with the loss of 1000 of the best soldiers
and Caesar's army did not sustain a complete defeat, this was due
simply to the circumstance that Pompeius also could not freely
develop his force on the broken ground, and to the further fact that,
fearing a stratagem, he at first held back his troops.

Consequences of Caesar's Defeats

But, even as it was, these days were fraught with mischief.
Not only had Caesar endured the most serious losses and forfeited
at a blow his entrenchments, the result of four months of gigantic
labour; he was by the recent engagements thrown back again exactly
to the point from which he had set out.  From the sea he was
more completely driven than ever, since Pompeius' elder son Gnaeus
had by a bold attack partly burnt, partly carried off, Caesar's
few ships of war lying in the port of Oricum, and had soon afterwards
also set fire to the transport fleet that was left behind in Lissus;
all possibility of bringing up fresh reinforcements to Caesar
by sea from Brundisium was thus lost.  The numerous Pompeian cavalry,
now released from their confinement, poured themselves over
the adjacent country and threatened to render the provisioning
of Caesar's army, which had always been difficult, utterly impossible.
Caesar's daring enterprise of carrying on offensive operations
without ships against an enemy in command of the sea and resting
on his fleet had totally failed.  On what had hitherto been
the theatre of war he found himself in presence of an impregnable
defensive position, and unable to strike a serious blow either
against Dyrrhachium or against the hostile army; on the other hand
it depended now solely on Pompeius whether he should proceed
to attack under the most favourable circumstances an antagonist
already in grave danger as to his means of subsistence.  The war
had arrived at a crisis.  Hitherto Pompeius had, to all appearance,
played the game of war without special plan, and only adjusted
his defence according to the exigencies of each attack; and this was
not to be censured, for the protraction of the war gave him opportunity
of making his recruits capable of fighting, of bringing up his reserves,
and of bringing more fully into play the superiority of his fleet
in the Adriatic.  Caesar was beaten not merely in tactics
but also in strategy.  This defeat had not, it is true,
that effect which Pompeius not without reason expected; the eminent
soldierly energy of Caesar's veterans did not allow matters
to come to an immediate and total breaking up of the army
by hunger and mutiny.  But yet it seemed as if it depended solely
on his opponent by judiciously following up his victory
to reap its full fruits.

War Prospects of Pompeius
Scipio and Calvinus

It was for Pompeius to assume the aggressive; and he was resolved
to do so.  Three different ways of rendering his victory fruitful
presented themselves to him.  The first and simplest was not to desist
from assailing the vanquished army, and, if it departed,
to pursue it.  Secondly, Pompeius might leave Caesar himself
and his best troops in Greece, and might cross in person, as he had
long been making preparations for doing, with the main army to Italy,
where the feeling was decidedly antimonarchical and the forces
of Caesar, after the despatch of the best troops and their brave
and trustworthy commandant to the Greek army, would not be
of very much moment.  Lastly, the victor might turn inland,
effect a junction with the legions of Metellus Scipio, and attempt
to capture the troops of Caesar stationed in the interior.
The latter forsooth had, immediately after the arrival of the second
freight from Italy, on the one hand despatched strong detachments
to Aetolia and Thessaly to procure means of subsistence for his army,
and on the other had ordered a corps of two legions under Gnaeus
Domitius Calvinus to advance on the Egnatian highway towards Macedonia,
with the view of intercepting and if possible defeating in detail
the corps of Scipio advancing on the same road from Thessalonica.
Calvinus and Scipio had already approached within a few miles
of each other, when Scipio suddenly turned southward and, rapidly
crossing the Haliacmon (Inje Karasu) and leaving his baggage there
under Marcus Favonius, penetrated into Thessaly, in order to attack
with superior force Caesar's legion of recruits employed
in the reduction of the country under Lucius Cassius Longinus.
But Longinus retired over the mountains towards Ambracia to join
the detachment under Gnaeus Calvisius Sabinus sent by Caesar
to Aetolia, and Scipio could only cause him to be pursued
by his Thracian cavalry, for Calvinus threatened his reserve
left behind under Favonius on the Haliacmon with the same fate
which he had himself destined for Longinus.  So Calvinus and Scipio
met again on the Haliacmon, and encamped there for a considerable time
opposite to each other.

Caesar's Retreat from Dyrrachium to Thessaly

Pompeius might choose among these plans; no choice was left to Caesar.
After that unfortunate engagement he entered on his retreat to Apollonia.
Pompeius followed.  The march from Dyrrhachium to Apollonia
along a difficult road crossed by several rivers was no easy task
for a defeated army pursued by the enemy; but the dexterous leadership
of their general and the indestructible marching energy of the soldiers
compelled Pompeius after four days' pursuit to suspend it as useless.
He had now to decide between the Italian expedition and the march
into the interior.  However advisable and attractive the former
might seem, and though various voices were raised in its favour,
he preferred not to abandon the corps of Scipio, the more especially
as he hoped by this march to get the corps of Calvinus into his hands.
Calvinus lay at the moment on the Egnatian road at Heraclea Lyncestis,
between Pompeius and Scipio, and, after Caesar had retreated
to Apollonia, farther distant from the latter than from the great army
of Pompeius; without knowledge, moreover, of the events at Dyrrhachium
and of his hazardous position, since after the successes achieved
at Dyrrhachium the whole country inclined to Pompeius and the messengers
of Caesar were everywhere seized.   It was not till the enemy's
main force had approached within a few hours of him that Calvinus
learned from the accounts of the enemy's advanced posts themselves
the state of things.  A quick departure in a southerly direction
towards Thessaly withdrew him at the last moment from imminent
destruction; Pompeius had to content himself with having
liberated Scipio from his position of peril.  Caesar had meanwhile
arrived unmolested at Apollonia.  Immediately after the disaster
of Dyrrhachium he had resolved if possible to transfer the struggle
from the coast away into the interior, with the view of getting beyond
the reach of the enemy's fleet--the ultimate cause of the failure
of his previous exertions.  The march to Apollonia had only been intended
to place his wounded in safety and to pay his soldiers there,
where his depots were stationed; as soon as this was done,
he set out for Thessaly, leaving behind garrisons in Apollonia,
Oricum, and Lissus.  The corps of Calvinus had also put itself
in motion towards Thessaly; and Caesar could effect a junction
with the reinforcements coming up from Italy, this time by the land-route
through Illyria--two legions under Quintus Cornificius--still more easily
in Thessaly than in Epirus.  Ascending by difficult paths in the valley
of the Aous and crossing the mountain-chain which separates Epirus
from Thessaly, he arrived at the Peneius; Calvinus was likewise
directed thither, and the junction of the two armies was thus accomplished
by the shortest route and that which was least exposed to the enemy.
It took place at Aeginium not far from the source of the Peneius.
The first Thessalian town before which the now united army appeared,
Gomphi, closed its gates against it; it was quickly stormed and given up
to pillage, and the other towns of Thessaly terrified by this example
submitted, so soon as Caesar's legions merely appeared before the walls.
Amidst these marches and conflicts, and with the help of the supplies--
albeit not too ample--which the region on the Peneius afforded,
the traces and recollections of the calamitous days through which
they had passed gradually vanished.

The victories of Dyrrhachium had thus borne not much immediate fruit
for the victors.  Pompeius with his unwieldy army and his numerous
cavalry had not been able to follow his versatile enemy
into the mountains; Caesar like Calvinus had escaped from pursuit,
and the two stood united and in full security in Thessaly.
Perhaps it would have been the best course, if Pompeius had now
without delay embarked with his main force for Italy, where success
was scarcely doubtful.  But in the meantime only a division
of the fleet departed for Sicily and Italy.  In the camp of the coalition
the contest with Caesar was looked on as so completely decided
by the battles of Dyrrhachium that it only remained to reap the fruits
of victory, in other words, to seek out and capture the defeated army.
Their former over-cautious reserve was succeeded by an arrogance
still less justified by the circumstances; they gave no heed
to the facts, that they had, strictly speaking, failed in the pursuit,
that they had to hold themselves in readiness to  encounter
a completely refreshed and reorganized army in Thessaly,
and that there was no small risk in moving away from the sea,
renouncing the support of the fleet, and following their antagonist
to the battlefield chosen by himself.  They were simply resolved
at any price to fight with Caesar, and therefore to get at him
as soon as possible and by the most convenient way.  Cato took up
the command in Dyrrhachium, where a garrison was left behind
of eighteen cohorts, and in Corcyra, where 300 ships of war were left;
Pompeius and Scipio proceeded--the former, apparently, following
the Egnatian way as far as Pella and then striking into the great road
to the south, the latter from the Haliacmon through the passes
of Olympus--to the lower Peneius and met at Larisa.

The Armies at Pharsalus

Caesar lay to the south of Larisa in the plain--which extends
between the hill-country of Cynoscephalae and the chain of Othrys
and is intersected by a tributary of the Peneius, the Enipeus--
on the left bank of the latter stream near the town of Pharsalus;
Pompeius pitched his camp opposite to him on the right bank
of the Enipeus along the slope of the heights of Cynoscephalae.(30)
The entire army of Pompeius was assembled; Caesar on the other hand
still expected the corps of nearly two legions formerly detached
to Aetolia and Thessaly, now stationed under Quintus Fufius Calenus
in Greece, and the two legions of Cornificius which were sent
after him by the land-route from Italy and had already arrived
in Illyria.  The army of Pompeius, numbering eleven legions
or 47,000 men and 7000 horse, was more than double that of Caesar
in infantry, and seven times as numerous in cavalry; fatigue
and conflicts had so decimated Caesar's troops, that his eight legions
did not number more than 22,000 men under arms, consequently
not nearly the half of their normal amount.  The victorious army
of Pompeius provided with a countless cavalry and good magazines had
provisions in abundance, while the troops of Caesar had difficulty
in keeping themselves alive and only hoped for better supplies
from the corn-harvest not far distant.  The Pompeian soldiers,
who had learned in the last campaign to know war and trust their leader,
were in the best of humour.  All military reasons on the side
of Pompeius favoured the view, that the decisive battle should not be
long delayed, seeing that they now confronted Caesar in Thessaly;
and the emigrant impatience of the many genteel officers and others
accompanying the army doubtless had more weight than even such reasons
in the council of war.  Since the events of Dyrrhachium
these lords regarded the triumph of their party as an ascertained fact;
already there was eager strife as to the filling up of Caesar's
supreme pontificate, and instructions were sent to Rome
to hire houses at the Forum for the next elections.  When Pompeius
hesitated on his part to cross the rivulet which separated
the two armies, and which Caesar with his much weaker army
did not venture to pass, this excited great indignation; Pompeius,
it was alleged, only delayed the battle in order to rule somewhat longer
over so many consulars and praetorians and to perpetuate his part
of Agamemnon.  Pompeius yielded; and Caesar, who under the impression
that matters would not come to a battle, had just projected
a mode of turning the enemy's army and for that purpose was on the point
of setting out towards Scotussa, likewise arrayed his legions for battle,
when he saw the Pompeians preparing to offer it to him on his bank.

The Battle

Thus the battle of Pharsalus was fought on the 9th August 706,
almost on the same field where a hundred and fifty years before
the Romans had laid the foundation of their dominion in the east.(31)
Pompeius rested his right wing on the Enipeus; Caesar opposite
to him rested his left on the broken ground stretching in front
of the Enipeus; the two other wings were stationed out in the plain,
covered in each case by the cavalry and the light troops.
The intention of Pompeius was to keep his infantry on the defensive,
but with his cavalry to scatter the weak band of horsemen which,
mixed after the German fashion with light infantry, confronted him,
and then to take Caesar's right wing in rear.  His infantry
courageously sustained the first charge of that of the enemy,
and the engagement there came to a stand.  Labienus likewise dispersed
the enemy's cavalry after a brave but short resistance,
and deployed his force to the left with the view of turning
the infantry.  But Caesar, foreseeing the defeat of his cavalry,
had stationed behind it on the threatened flank of his right wing
some 2000 of his best legionaries.  As the enemy's horsemen,
driving those of Caesar before them, galloped along and around the line,
they suddenly came upon this select corps advancing intrepidly
against them and, rapidly thrown into confusion by the unexpected
and unusual infantry attack,(32) they galloped at full speed
from the field of battle.  The victorious legionaries cut to pieces
the enemy's archers now unprotected, then rushed at the left wing
of the enemy, and began now on their part to turn it.  At the same time
Caesar's third division hitherto reserved advanced along
the whole line to the attack.  The unexpected defeat of the best arm
of the Pompeian army, as it raised the courage of their opponents,
broke that of the army and above all that of the general.  When Pompeius,
who from the outset did not trust his infantry, saw the horsemen
gallop off, he rode back at once from the field of battle to the camp,
without even awaiting the issue of the general attack ordered by Caesar.
His legions began to waver and soon to retire over the brook
into the camp, which was not accomplished without severe loss.

Its Issue
Flight of Pompeius

The day was thus lost and many an able soldier had fallen,
but the army was still substantially intact, and the situation
of Pompeius was far less perilous than that of Caesar after the defeat
of Dyrrhachium.  But while Caesar in the vicissitudes of his destiny
had learned that fortune loves to withdraw herself at certain moments
even from her favourites in order to be once more won back
through their perseverance, Pompeius knew fortune hitherto
only as the constant goddess, and despaired of himself and of her
when she withdrew from him; and, while in Caesar's grander nature
despair only developed yet mightier energies, the inferior soul
of Pompeius under similar pressure sank into the infinite abyss
of despondency.  As once in the war with Sertorius he had been
on the point of abandoning the office entrusted to him in presence
of his superior opponent and of departing,(33) so now, when he saw
the legions retire over the stream, he threw from him the fatal
general's scarf, and rode off by the nearest route to the sea,
to find means of embarking there.  His army discouraged and leaderless--
for Scipio, although recognized by Pompeius as colleague in supreme
command, was yet general-in-chief only in name--hoped to find protection
behind the camp-walls; but Caesar allowed it no rest; the obstinate
resistance of the Roman and Thracian guard of the camp was speedily
overcome, and the mass was compelled to withdraw in disorder
to the heights of Crannon and Scotussa, at the foot of which
the camp was pitched.  It attempted by moving forward along these hills
to regain Larisa; but the troops of Caesar, heeding neither
booty nor fatigue and advancing by better paths in the plain,
intercepted the route of the fugitives; in fact, when  late
in the evening the Pompeians suspended their march, their pursuers
were able even to draw an entrenched line which precluded
the fugitives from access to the only rivulet to be found
in the neighbourhood.  So ended the day of Pharsalus.  The enemy's army
was not only defeated, but annihilated; 15,000 of the enemy
lay dead or wounded on the field of battle, while the Caesarians missed
only 200 men; the body which remained together, amounting still
to nearly 20,000 men, laid down their arms on the morning after
the battle only isolated troops, including, it is true, the officers
of most note, sought a refuge in the mountains; of the eleven eagles
of the enemy nine were handed over to Caesar.  Caesar,
who on the very day of the battle had reminded the soldiers
that they should not forget the fellow-citizen in the foe,
did not treat the captives as did Bibulus and Labienus;
nevertheless he too found it necessary now to exercise some severity.
The common soldiers were incorporated in the army, fines
or confiscations of property were inflicted on the men of better rank;
the senators and equites of note who were taken, with few exceptions,
suffered death.  The time for clemency was past; the longer
the civil war lasted, the more remorseless and implacable it became.

The Political Effects of the Battle of Pharsalus
The East Submits

Some time elapsed, before the consequences of the 9th of August 706
could be fully discerned.  What admitted of least doubt,
was the passing over to the side of Caesar of all those
who had attached themselves to the party vanquished at Pharsalus
merely as to the more powerful; the defeat was so thoroughly
decisive, that the victor was joined by all who were not willing
or were not obliged to fight for a lost cause.  All the kings,
peoples, and cities, which had hitherto been the clients of Pompeius,
now recalled their naval and military contingents and declined
to receive the refugees of the beaten party; such as Egypt, Cyrene,
the communities of Syria, Phoenicia, Cilicia and Asia Minor, Rhodes,
Athens, and generally the whole east.  In fact Pharnaces
king of the Bosporus pushed his officiousness so far, that on the news
of the Pharsalian battle he took possession not only of the town
of Phanagoria which several years before had been declared free
by Pompeius, and of the dominions of the Colchian princes confirmed
by him, but even of the kingdom of Little Armenia which Pompeius
had conferred on king Deiotarus.  Almost the sole exceptions
to this general submission were the little town of Megara
which allowed itself to be besieged and stormed by the Caesarians,
and Juba king of Numidia, who had for long expected, and after the victory
over Curio expected only with all the greater certainty, that his kingdom
would be annexed by Caesar, and was thus obliged for better or for worse
to abide by the defeated party.

The Aristocracy after the Battle of Pharsalus

In the same way as the client communities submitted to the victor
of Pharsalus, the tail of the constitutional party--all who had
joined it with half a heart or had even, like Marcus Cicero
and his congeners, merely danced around the aristocracy like the witches
around the Brocken--approached to make their peace with the new monarch,
a peace accordingly which his contemptuous indulgence readily
and courteously granted to the petitioners.  But the flower
of the defeated party made no compromise.  All was over
with the aristocracy; but the aristocrats could never become converted
to monarchy.  The highest revelations of humanity are perishable;
the religion once true may become a lie,(34) the polity once fraught
with blessing may become a curse; but even the gospel that is past
still finds confessors, and if such a faith cannot remove mountains
like faith in the living truth, it yet remains true to itself
down to its very end, and does not depart from the realm of the living
till it has dragged its last priests and its last partisans
along with it, and a new generation, freed from those shadows of the past
and the perishing, rules over a world that has renewed its youth.
So it was in Rome.  Into whatever abyss of degeneracy the aristocratic
rule had now sunk, it had once been a great political system;
the sacred fire, by which Italy had been conquered and Hannibal
had been vanquished, continued to glow--although somewhat dimmed
and dull--in the Roman nobility so long as that nobility existed,
and rendered a cordial understanding between the men of the old regime
and the new monarch impossible.  A large portion of the constitutional
party submitted at least outwardly, and recognized the monarchy
so far as to accept pardon from Caesar and to retire as much as possible
into private life; which, however, ordinarily was not done
without the mental reservation of thereby preserving themselves
for a future change of things.  This course was chiefly followed
by the partisans of lesser note; but the able Marcus Marcellus,
the same who had brought about the rupture with Caesar,(35)
was to be found among these judicious persons and voluntarily
banished himself to Lesbos.  In the majority, however, of the genuine
aristocracy passion was more powerful than cool reflection;
along with which, no doubt, self-deceptions as to success
being still possible and apprehensions of the inevitable
vengeance of the victor variously co-operated.

Cato

No one probably formed a judgment as to the situation of affairs
with so painful a clearness, and so free from fear or hope
on his own account, as Marcus Cato.  Completely convinced
that after the days of Ilerda and Pharsalus the monarchy was inevitable,
and morally firm enough to confess to himself this bitter truth
and to act in accordance with it, he hesitated for a moment whether
the constitutional party ought at all to continue a war, which would
necessarily require sacrifices for a lost cause on the part of many
who did not know why they offered them.  And when he resolved
to fight against the monarchy not for victory, but for a speedier
and more honourable fall, he yet sought as far as possible to draw
no one into this war, who chose to survive the fall of the republic
and to be reconciled to monarchy.  He conceived that, so long
as the republic had been merely threatened, it was a right and a duty
to compel the lukewarm and bad citizen to take part in the struggle;
but that now it was senseless and cruel to compel the individual
to share the ruin of the lost republic.  Not only did he himself
discharge every one who desired to return to Italy; but when the wildest
of the wild partisans, Gnaeus Pompeius the younger, insisted
on the execution of these people and of Cicero in particular:
it was Cato alone who by his moral authority prevented it.

Pompeius

Pompeius also had no desire for peace.  Had he been a man
who deserved to hold the position which he occupied, we might suppose
him to have perceived that he who aspires to a crown cannot return
to the beaten track of ordinary existence, and that there is
accordingly no place left on earth for one who has failed.
But Pompeius was hardly too noble-minded to ask a favour,
which the victor would have been perhaps magnanimous enough
not to refuse to him; on the contrary, he was probably too mean
to do so.  Whether it was that he could not make up his mind
to trust himself to Caesar, or that in his usual vague
and undecided way, after the first immediate impression of the disaster
of Pharsalus had vanished, be began again to cherish hope, Pompeius
was resolved to continue the struggle against Caesar and to seek
for himself yet another battle-field after that of Pharsalus.

Military Effects of the Battle
The Leaders Scattered

Thus, however much Caesar had striven by prudence and moderation
to appease the fury of his opponents and to lessen their number,
the struggle nevertheless went on without alteration.  But the leading
men had almost all taken part in the fight at Pharsalus;
and, although they all escaped with the exception of Lucius Domitius
Ahenobarbus, who was killed in the flight, they were yet scattered
in all directions, so that they were unable to concert a common plan
for the continuance of the campaign.  Most of them found their way,
partly through the desolate mountains of Macedonia and Illyria,
partly by the aid of the fleet, to Corcyra, where Marcus Cato
commanded the reserve left behind.  Here a sort of council
of war took place under the presidency of Cato, at which Metellus Scipio,
Titus Labienus, Lucius Afranius, Gnaeus Pompeius the younger
and others were present; but the absence of the commander-in-chief
and the painful uncertainty as to his fate, as well as the internal
dissensions of the party, prevented the adoption of any common
resolution, and ultimately each took the course which seemed to him
the most suitable for himself or for the common cause.  It was in fact
in a high degree difficult to say among the many straws
to which they might possibly cling which was the one
that would keep longest above water.

Macedonia and Greece
Italy
The East
Egypt
Spain
Africa

Macedonia and Greece were lost by the battle of Pharsalus.
It is true that Cato, who had immediately on the news of the defeat
evacuated Dyrrhachium, still held Corcyra, and Rutilius Lupus
the Peloponnesus, during a time for the constitutional party.
For a moment it seemed also as if the Pompeians would make a stand
at Patrae in the Peloponnesus; but the accounts of the advance
of Calenus sufficed to frighten them from that quarter.  As little
was there any attempt to maintain Corcyra.  On the Italian
and Sicilian coasts the Pompeian squadrons despatched thither
after the victories of Dyrrhachium(36) had achieved not unimportant
successes against the ports of Brundisium, Messana and Vibo,
and at Messana especially had burnt the whole fleet in course
of being fitted out for Caesar; but the ships that were thus active,
mostly from Asia Minor and Syria, were recalled by their communities
in consequence of the Pharsalian battle, so that the expedition
came to an end of itself.  In Asia Minor and Syria there were
at the moment no troops of either party, with the exception
of the Bosporan army of Pharnaces which had taken possession,
ostensibly on Caesar's account, of different regions belonging
to his opponents.  In Egypt there was still indeed a considerable
Roman army, formed of the troops left behind there by Gabinius(37)
and thereafter recruited from Italian vagrants and Syrian
or Cilician banditti; but it was self-evident and was soon
officially confirmed by the recall of the Egyptian vessels,
that the court of Alexandria by no means had the intention
of holding firmly by the defeated party or of even placing
its force of troops at their disposal.  Somewhat more favourable
prospects presented themselves to the vanquished in the west.
In Spain Pompeian sympathies were so strong among the population,
that the Caesarians had on that account to give up the attack
which they contemplated from this quarter against Africa,
and an insurrection seemed inevitable, so soon as a leader of note
should appear in the peninsula.  In Africa moreover the coalition,
or rather Juba king of Numidia, who was the true regent there,
had been arming unmolested since the autumn of 705.  While the whole
east was consequently lost to the coalition by the battle
of Pharsalus, it might on the other hand continue the war
after an honourable manner probably in Spain, and certainly in Africa;
for to claim the aid of the king of Numidia, who had for a long time
been subject to the Roman community, against revolutionary fellow-
burgesses was for Romans a painful humiliation doubtless, but by no means
an act of treason.  Those again who in this conflict of despair
had no further regard for right or honour, might declare themselves
beyond the pale of the law, and commence hostilities as robbers;
or might enter into alliance with independent neighbouring states,
and introduce the public foe into the intestine strife; or, lastly,
might profess monarchy with the lips and prosecute the restoration
of the legitimate republic with the dagger of the assassin.

Hostilities of Robbers and Pirates

That the vanquished should withdraw and renounce the new monarchy,
was at least the natural and so far the truest expression of their
desperate position.  The mountains and above all the sea had been
in those times ever since the memory of man the asylum not only
of all crime, but also of intolerable misery and of oppressed right;
it was natural for Pompeians and republicans to wage a defiant war
against the monarchy of Caesar, which had ejected them,
in the mountains and on the seas, and especially natural for them
to take up piracy on a greater scale, with more compact organization,
and with more definite aims.  Even after the recall of the squadrons
that had come from the east they still possessed a very considerable
fleet of their own, while Caesar was as yet virtually without
vessels of war; and their connection with the Dalmatae who had risen
in their own interest against Caesar,(38) and their control
over the most important seas and seaports, presented the most
advantageous prospects for a naval war, especially on a small scale.
As formerly Sulla's hunting out of the democrats had ended
in the Sertorian insurrection, which was a conflict first waged
by pirates and then by robbers and ultimately became a very serious war,
so possibly, if there was in the Catonian aristocracy or among
the adherents of Pompeius as much spirit and fire as in the Marian
democracy, and if there was found among them a true sea-king,
a commonwealth independent of the monarchy of Caesar and perhaps a match
for it might arise on the still unconquered sea.

Parthian Alliance

Far more serious disapproval in every respect is due to the idea
of dragging an independent neighbouring state into the Roman civil war
and of bringing about by its means a counter-revolution;
law and conscience condemn the deserter more severely than the robber,
and a victorious band of robbers finds its way back to a free
and well-ordered commonwealth more easily than the emigrants who are
conducted back by the public foe.  Besides it was scarcely probable
that the beaten party would be able to effect a restoration in this way.
The only state, from which they could attempt to seek support,
was that of the Parthians; and as to this it was at least doubtful
whether it would make their cause its own, and very improbable
that it would fight out that cause against Caesar.

The time for republican conspiracies had not yet come.

Caesar Pursues Pompeius to Egypt

While the remnant of the defeated party thus allowed themselves
to be helplessly driven about by fate, and even those
who had determined to continue the struggle knew not how or where
to do so, Caesar, quickly as ever resolving and quickly acting,
laid everything aside to pursue Pompeius--the only one of his opponents
whom he respected as an officer, and the one whose personal capture
would have probably paralyzed a half, and that perhaps
the more dangerous half, of his opponents.  With a few men
he crossed the Hellespont--his single bark encountered in it a fleet
of the enemy destined for the Black Sea, and took the whole crews,
struck as with stupefaction by the news of the battle of Pharsalus,
prisoners--and as soon as the most necessary preparations were made,
hastened in pursuit of Pompeius to the east.  The latter had gone
from the Pharsalian battlefield to Lesbos, whence he brought away
his wife and his second son Sextus, and had sailed onward round
Asia Minor to Cilicia and thence to Cyprus.  He might have joined
his partisans at Corcyra or Africa; but repugnance toward his
aristocratic allies and the thought of the reception which awaited him
there after the day of Pharsalus and above all after his disgraceful
flight, appear to have induced him to take his own course
and rather to resort to the protection of the Parthian king
than to that of Cato.  While he was employed in collecting money
and slaves from the Roman revenue-farmers and merchants in Cyprus,
and in arming a band of 2000 slaves, he received news that Antioch
had declared for Caesar and that the route to the Parthians
was no longer open.  So he altered his plan and sailed to Egypt,
where a number of his old soldiers served in the army and the situation
and rich resources of the country allowed him time and opportunity
to reorganize the war.

In Egypt, after the death of Ptolemaeus Auletes (May 703)
his children, Cleopatra about sixteen years of age and Ptolemaeus Dionysus
about ten, had ascended the throne according to their father's will
jointly, and as consorts; but soon the brother or rather his guardian
Pothinus had driven the sister from the kingdom and compelled her
to seek a refuge in Syria, whence she made preparations
to get back to her paternal kingdom.  Ptolemaeus and Pothinus
lay with the whole Egyptian army at Pelusium for the sake
of protecting the eastern frontier against her, just when Pompeius
cast anchor at the Casian promontory and sent a request to the king
to allow him to land.  The Egyptian court, long informed of the disaster
at Pharsalus, was on the point of refusing to receive Pompeius;
but the king's tutor Theodotus pointed out that, in that case
Pompeius would probably employ his connections in the Egyptian army
to instigate rebellion; and that it would be safer, and also preferable
with regard to Caesar, if they embraced the opportunity of making away
with Pompeius.  Political reasonings of this sort did not readily fail
of their effect among the statesmen of the Hellenic world.

Death of Pompeius

Achillas the general of the royal troops and some of the former soldiers
of Pompeius went off in a boat to his vessel; and invited him
to come to the king and, as the water was shallow, to enter their barge.
As he was stepping ashore, the military tribune Lucius Septimius
stabbed him from behind, under the eyes of his wife and son
who were compelled to be spectators of the murder from the deck
of their vessel, without being able to rescue or revenge
(28 Sept. 706).  On the same day, on which thirteen years before
he had entered the capital in triumph over Mithradates,(39)
the man, who for a generation had been called the Great and for years
had ruled Rome, died on the desert sands of the inhospitable
Casian shore by the hand of one of his old soldiers.  A good officer
but otherwise of mediocre gifts of intellect and of heart,
fate had with superhuman constancy for thirty years allowed him
to solve all brilliant and toilless tasks; had permitted him to pluck
all laurels planted and fostered by others; had brought him
face to face with all the conditions requisite for obtaining
the supreme power--only in order to exhibit in his person an example
of spurious greatness, to which history knows no parallel.
Of all pitiful parts there is none more pitiful than that of passing
for more than one really is; and it is the fate of monarchy
that this misfortune inevitably clings to it, for barely once
in a thousand years does there arise among the people a man
who is a king not merely in name, but in reality.  If this disproportion
between semblance and reality has never perhaps been so abruptly marked
as in Pompeius, the fact may well excite grave reflection that it was
precisely he who in a certain sense opened the series of Roman monarchs.

Arrival of Caesar

When Caesar following the track of Pompeius arrived in the roadstead
of Alexandria, all was already over.  With deep  agitation
he turned away when the murderer brought to his ship the head of the man,
who had been his son-in-law and for long years his colleague
in rule, and to get whom alive into his power he had come to Egypt.
The dagger of the rash assassin precluded an answer to the question,
how Caesar would have dealt with the captive Pompeius; but, while
the humane sympathy, which still found a place in the great soul
of Caesar side by side with ambition, enjoined that he should
spare his former friend, his interest also required that he should
annihilate Pompeius otherwise than by the executioner.
Pompeius had been for twenty years the acknowledged ruler
of Rome; a dominion so deeply rooted does not perish
with the ruler's death.  The death of Pompeius did not break up
the Pompeians, but gave to them instead of an aged, incapable,
and worn-out chief in his sons Gnaeus and Sextus two leaders,
both of whom were young and active and the second was a man
of decided capacity.  To the newly-founded hereditary monarchy
hereditary pretendership attached itself at once like a parasite,
and it was very doubtful whether by this change of persons Caesar
did not lose more than he gained.

Caesar Regulates Egypt

Meanwhile in Egypt Caesar had now nothing further to do,
and the Romans and the Egyptians expected that he would
immediately set sail and apply himself to the subjugation of Africa,
and to the huge task of organization which awaited him after the victory.
But Caesar faithful to his custom--wherever he found himself
in the wide empire--of finally regulating matters at once and in person,
and firmly convinced that no resistance was to be expected
either from the Roman garrison or from the court, being, moreover,
in urgent pecuniary embarrassment, landed in Alexandria
with the two amalgamated legions accompanying him to the number
of 3200 men and 800 Celtic and German cavalry, took up his quarters
in the royal palace, and proceeded to collect the necessary sums of money
and to regulate the Egyptian succession, without allowing himself
to be disturbed by the saucy remark of Pothinus that Caesar
should not for such petty matters neglect his own so important affairs.
In his dealing with the Egyptians he was just and even indulgent.
Although the aid which they had given to Pompeius justified
the imposing of a war contribution, the exhausted land was spared
from this; and, while the arrears of the sum stipulated for in 695(40)
and since then only about half paid were remitted, there was required
merely a final payment of 10,000,000 -denarii- (400,000 pounds).
The belligerent brother and sister were enjoined immediately
to suspend hostilities, and were invited to have their dispute
investigated and decided before the arbiter.  They submitted;
the royal boy was already in the palace and Cleopatra also presented
herself there.  Caesar adjudged the kingdom of Egypt, agreeably
to the testament of Auletes, to the intermarried brother and sister
Cleopatra and Ptolemaeus Dionysus, and further gave unasked
the kingdom of Cyprus--cancelling the earlier act of annexation(41)--
as the appanageof the second-born of Egypt to the younger children
of Auletes, Arsinoe and Ptolemaeus the younger.

Insurrection in Alexandria

But a storm was secretly preparing.  Alexandria was a cosmopolitan city
as well as Rome, hardly inferior to the Italian capital in the number
of its inhabitants, far superior to it in stirring commercial spirit,
in skill of handicraft, in taste for science and art: in the citizens
there was a lively sense of their own national importance,
and, if there was no political sentiment, there was at any rate
a turbulent spirit, which induced them to indulge in their
street riots as regularly and as heartily as the Parisians
of the present day: one may conceive their feelings, when they saw
the Roman general ruling in the palace of the Lagids and their kings
accepting the award of his tribunal.  Pothinus and the boy-king,
both as may be conceived very dissatisfied at once with the peremptory
requisition of old debts and with the intervention in the throne-
dispute which could only issue, as it did, in favour of Cleopatra,
sent--in order to pacify the Roman demands--the treasures
of the temples and the gold plate of the king with intentional
ostentation to be melted at the mint; with increasing
indignation the Egyptians--who were pious even to superstition,
and who rejoiced in the world-renowned magnificence of their court
as if it were a possession of their own--beheld the bare walls
of their temples and the wooden cups on the table of their king.
The Roman army of occupation also, which had been essentially
denationalized by its long abode in Egypt and the many intermarriages
between the soldiers and Egyptian women, and which moreover
numbered a multitude of the old soldiers of Pompeius and runaway
Italian criminals and slaves in its ranks, was indignant at Caesar,
by whose orders it had been obliged to suspend its action
on the Syrian frontier, and at his handful of haughty legionaries.
The tumult even at the landing, when the multitude saw the Roman axes
carried into the old palace, and the numerous cases in which
his soldiers were assassinated in the city, had taught Caesar
the immense danger in which he was placed with his small force
in presence of that exasperated multitude.  But it was difficult
to return on account of the north-west winds prevailing at this season
of the year, and the attempt at embarkation might easily become
a signal for the outbreak of the insurrection; besides, it was not
the nature of Caesar to take his departure without having accomplished
his work.  He accordingly ordered up at once reinforcements
from Asia, and meanwhile, till these arrived, made a show
of the utmost self-possession.  Never was there greater gaiety
in his camp than during this rest at Alexandria; and while
the beautiful and clever Cleopatra was not sparing of her charms
in general and least of all towards her judge, Caesar also appeared
among all his victories to value most those won over beautiful women.
It was a merry prelude to graver scenes.  Under the leadership
of Achillas and, as was afterwards proved, by the secret orders
of the king and his guardian, the Roman army of occupation
stationed in Egypt appeared unexpectedly in Alexandria; and as soon as
the citizens saw that it had come to attack Caesar, they made
common cause with the soldiers.

Caesar in Alexandria

With a presence of mind, which in some measure justifies
his earlier foolhardiness, Caesar hastily collected his scattered men;
seized the persons of the king and his ministers; entrenched himself
in the royal residence and the adjoining theatre; and gave orders,
as there was no time to place in safety the war-fleet stationed
in the principal harbour immediately in front of the theatre,
that it should be set on fire and that Pharos, the island
with the light-tower commanding the harbour, should be occupied
by means of boats.  Thus at least a restricted position for defence
was secured, and the way was kept open to procure supplies
and reinforcements.  At the same time orders were issued
to the commandant of Asia Minor as well as to the nearest
subject countries, the Syrians and Nabataeans, the Cretans
and the Rhodians, to send troops and ships in all haste to Egypt.
The insurrection at the head of which the princess Arsinoe
and her confidant the eunuch Ganymedes had placed themselves,
meanwhilehad free course in all Egypt and in the greater part
of the capital.  In the streets of the latter there was daily fighting,
but without success either on the part of Caesar in gaining freer scope
and breaking through to the fresh water lake of Marea which lay behind
the town, where he could have provided himself with water and forage,
or on the part of the Alexandrians in acquiring superiority
over the besieged and depriving them of all drinking water; for,
when the Nile canals in Caesar's part of the town had been spoiled
by the introduction of salt water, drinkable water was unexpectedly found
in wells dug on the beach.

As Caesar was not to be overcome from the landward side,
the exertions of the besiegers were directed to destroy his fleet
and cut him off from the sea by which supplies reached him.
The island with the lighthouse and the mole by which this was connected
with the mainland divided the harbour into a western and an eastern half,
which were in communication with each other through two arched openings
in the mole.  Caesar commanded the island and the east harbour,
while the mole and the west harbour were in possession
of the citizens; and, as the Alexandrian fleet was burnt,
his vessels sailed in and out without hindrance. The Alexandrians,
after having vainly attempted to introduce fire-ships from the western
into the eastern harbour, equipped with the remnant of their arsenal
a small squadron and with this blocked up the way of Caesar's vessels,
when these were towing in a fleet of transports with a legion
that had arrived from Asia Minor; but the excellent Rhodian mariners
of Caesar mastered the enemy.  Not  long afterwards, however,
the citizens captured the lighthouse- island,(42) and from that point
totally closed the narrow and rocky mouth of the east harbour
for larger ships; so that Caesar's fleet was compelled
to take its station in the open roads before the east harbour,
and his communication with the sea hung only on a weak thread.
Caesar's fleet, attacked in that roadstead repeatedly
by the superior naval force of the enemy, could neither shun
the unequal strife, since the loss of the lighthouse-island
closed the inner harbour against it, nor yet withdraw, for the loss
of the roadstead would have debarred Caesar wholly from the sea.
Though the brave legionaries, supported by the dexterity
of the Rhodian sailors, had always hitherto decided these conflicts
in favour of the Romans, the Alexandrians renewed and augmented
their naval armaments with unwearied perseverance; the besieged
had to fight as often as it pleased the besiegers, and if the former
should be on a single occasion vanquished, Caesar would be
totally hemmed in and probably lost.

It was absolutely necessary to make an attempt to recover
the lighthouse island.  The double attack, which was made by boats
from the side of the harbour and by the war-vessels from the seaboard,
in reality brought not only the island but also the lower part
of the mole into Caesar's power; it was only at the second arch-
opening of the mole that Caesar ordered the attack to be stopped,
and the mole to be there closed towards the city by a transverse wall.
But while a violent conflict arose here around the entrenchers,
the Roman troops left the lower part of the mole adjoining
the island bare of defenders; a division of Egyptians landed there
unexpectedly, attacked in the rear the Roman soldiers and sailors
crowded together on the mole at the transverse wall, and drove
the whole mass in wild confusion into the sea.  A part
were taken on board by the Roman ships; the most were drowned.
Some 400 soldiers and a still greater number of men belonging
to the fleet were sacrificed on this day; the general himself,
who had shared the fate of his men, had been obliged to seek refuge,
in his ship, and when this sank from having been overloaded with men,
he  had to save himself by swimming to another.  But, severe as was
the loss suffered, it was amply compensated by the recovery
of the lighthouse-island, which along with the mole as far as
the first arch-opening remained in the hands of Caesar.

Relieving Army from Asia Minor

At length the longed-for relief arrived.  Mithradates of Pergamus,
an able warrior of the school of Mithradates Eupator, whose natural son
he claimed to be, brought up by land from Syria a motley army--
the Ityraeans of the prince of the Libanus,(43) the Bedouins
of Jamblichus, son of Sampsiceramus,(44) the Jews under the minister
Antipater, and the contingents generally of the petty chiefs
and communities of Cilicia and Syria.  From Pelusium, which Mithradates
had the fortune to occupy on the day of his arrival, he took
the great road towards Memphis with the view of avoiding
the intersected ground of the Delta and crossing the Nile
before its division; during which movement his troops received
manifold support from the Jewish peasants who were settled
in peculiar numbers in this part of Egypt.  The Egyptians,
with the young king Ptolemaeus now at their head, whom Caesar
had released to his people in the vain hope of allaying the insurrection
by his means, despatched an army to the Nile, to detain Mithradates
on its farther bank.  This army fell in with the enemy
even beyond Memphis at the so-called Jews'-camp, between Onion
and Heliopolis; nevertheless Mithradates, trained in the Roman fashion
of manoeuvring and encamping, amidst successful conflicts gained
the opposite bank at Memphis.  Caesar, on the other hand, as soon as
he obtained news of the arrival of the relieving army, conveyed a part
of his troops in ships to the end of the lake of Marea to the west
of Alexandria, and marched round this lake and down the Nile
to meet Mithradates advancing up the river.

Battle at the Nile

The junction took place without the enemy attempting to hinder it.
Caesar then marched into the Delta, whither the king had retreated,
overthrew, notwithstanding the deeply cut canal in their front,
the Egyptian vanguard at the first onset, and immediately stormed
the Egyptian camp itself.  It lay at the foot of a rising ground
between the Nile--from which only a narrow path separated it--
and marshes difficult of access.  Caesar caused the camp to be assailed
simultaneously from the front and from the flank on the path
along the Nile; and during this assault ordered a third detachment
to ascend unseen the heights behind the camp.  The victory was complete
the camp was taken, and those of the Egyptians who did not fal
beneath the sword of the enemy were drowned in the attempt to escape
to the fleet on the Nile.  With one of the boats, which sank
overladen with men, the young king also disappeared in the waters
of his native stream.

Pacificatin of Alexandria

Immediately after the battle Caesar advanced at the head
of his cavalry from the land-side straight into the portion
of the capital occupied by the Egyptians.  In mourning attire,
with the images of their gods in their hands, the enemy received him
and sued for peace; and his troops, when they saw him return as victor
from the side opposite to that by which he had set forth, welcomed him
with boundless joy.  The fate of the town, which had ventured
to thwart the plans of the master of the world and had brought him
within a hair's-breadth of destruction, lay in Caesar's hands;
but he was too much of a ruler to be sensitive, and dealt with
the Alexandrians as with the Massiliots.  Caesar--pointing
to their city severely devastated and deprived of its granaries,
of its world-renowned library, and of other important public buildings
on occasion of the burning of the fleet--exhorted the inhabitants
in future earnestly to cultivate the arts of peace alone, and to heal
the wounds which they had inflicted on themselves; for the rest,
he  contented himself with granting to the Jews settled in Alexandria
the same rights which the Greek population of the city enjoyed,
and with placing in Alexandria, instead of the previous Roman army
of occupation which nominally at least obeyed the kings of Egypt,
a formal Roman garrison--two of the legions besieged there,
and a third which afterwards arrived from Syria--under a commander
nominated by himself.  For this position of trust a man
was purposely selected, whose birth made it impossible for him
to abuse it--Rufio, an able soldier, but the son of a freedman.
Cleopatra and her younger brother Ptolemaeus obtained the sovereignty
of Egypt under the supremacy of Rome; the princess Arsinoe
was carried off to Italy, that she might not serve once more as a pretext
for insurrections to the Egyptians, who were after the Oriental fashion
quite as much devoted to their dynasty as they were indifferent
towards the individual dynasts; Cyprus became again a part
of the Roman province of Cilicia.

Course of Things during Caesar's Absence in Alexandria

This Alexandrian insurrection, insignificant as it was in itself
and slight as was its intrinsic connection with the events
of importance in the world's history which took place at the same time
in the Roman state, had nevertheless so far a momentous influence
on them that it compelled the man, who was all in all and without whom
nothing could be despatched and nothing could be solved,
to leave his proper tasks in abeyance from October 706 up to March 707
in order to fight along with Jews and Bedouins against a city rabble.
The consequences of personal rule began to make themselves felt.
They had the monarchy; but the wildest confusion prevailed everywhere,
and the monarch was absent.  The Caesarians were for the moment,
just like the Pompeians, without superintendence; the ability
of the individual officers and, above all, accident
decided matters everywhere.

Insubordination of Pharnaces

In Asia Minor there was, at the time of Caesar's departure for Egypt,
no enemy.  But Caesar's lieutenant there, the able Gnaeus Domitius
Calvinus, had received orders to take away again from king Pharnaces
what he had without instructions wrested from the allies of Pompeius;
and, as Pharnaces, an obstinate and arrogant despot like his father,
perseveringly refused to evacuate Lesser Armenia, no course remained
but to march against him.  Calvinus had been obliged to despatch
to Egypt two out of the three legions left behind with him and formed
out of the Pharsalian prisoners of war; he filled up the gap
by one legion hastily gathered from the Romans domiciled in Pontus
and two legions of Deiotarus exercised after the Roman manner,
and advanced into Lesser Armenia. But the Bosporan army,
tried in numerous conflicts with the dwellers on the Black Sea,
showed itself more efficient than his own.

Calvinus Defeated at Nicopolis
Victory of Caesar at Ziela

In an engagement at Nicopolis the Pontic levy of Calvinus
was cut to pieces and the Galatian legions ran off; only the one old
legion of the Romans fought its way through with moderate loss.
Instead of conquering Lesser Armenia, Calvinus could not even prevent
Pharnaces from repossessing himself of his Pontic "hereditary states,"
and pouring forth the whole vials of his horrible sultanic caprices
on their inhabitants, especially the unhappy Amisenes
(winter of 706-707).  When Caesar in person arrived in Asia Minor
and intimated to him that the service which Pharnaces had rendered
to him personally by having granted no help to Pompeius could not be
taken into account against the injury inflicted on the empire,
and that before any negotiation he must evacuate the province of Pontus
and send back the property which he had pillaged, he declared himself
doubtless ready to submit; nevertheless, well knowing how good reason
Caesar had for hastening to the west, he made no serious preparations
for the evacuation.  He did not know that Caesar finished
whatever he took in hand.  Without negotiating further,
Caesar took with him the one legion which he brought from Alexandria
and the troops of Calvinus and Deiotarus, and advanced against
the camp of Pharnaces at Ziela.  When the Bosporans saw him approach,
they boldly crossed the deep mountain-ravine which covered their front,
and charged the Romans up the hill.  Caesar's soldiers
were still occupied in pitching their camp, and the ranks wavered
for a moment; but the veterans accustomed to war rapidly rallied
and set the example for a general attack and for a complete victory
(2 Aug. 707).  In five days the campaign was ended--an invaluable piece
of good fortune at this time, when every hour was precious.

Regulation of Asia Minor

Caesar entrusted the pursuit of the king, who had gone home by way
of Sinope to Pharnaces' illegitimate brother, the brave Mithradates
of Pergamus, who as a reward for the services rendered by him in Egypt
received the crown of the Bosporan kingdom in room of Pharnaces.
In other respects the affairs of Syria and Asia Minor were peacefully
settled; Caesar's own allies were richly rewarded, those of Pompeius
were in general dismissed with fines or reprimands.  Deiotarus alone,
the most powerful of the clients of Pompeius, was again confined
to his narrow hereditary domain, the canton of the Tolistobogii.
In his stead Ariobarzanes king of Cappadocia was invested with
Lesser Armenia, and the tetrarchy of the Trocmi usurped by Deiotarus
was conferred on the new king of the Bosporus, who was descended
by the maternal side from one of the Galatian princely houses
as by the paternal from that of Pontus.

War by Land and Sea in Illyria
Defeat of Gabinius
Naval Victory at Tauris

In Illyria also, while Caesar was in Egypt, incidents of a very grave
nature had occurred.  The Dalmatian coast had been for centuries
a sore blemish on the Roman rule, and its inhabitants had been
at open feud with Caesar since the conflicts around Dyrrhachium;
while the interior also since the time of the Thessalian war,
swarmed with dispersed Pompeians.  Quintus Cornificius
had however, with the legions that followed him from Italy,
kept both the natives and the refugees in check and had
at the same time sufficiently met the difficult task of provisioning
the troops in these rugged districts.  Even when the able
Marcus Octavius, the victor of Curicta,(45) appeared with a part
of the Pompeian fleet in these waters to wage war there against Caesar
by sea and land, Cornificius not only knew how to maintain himself,
resting for support on the ships and the harbour of the Iadestini
(Zara), but in his turn also sustained several successful engagements
at sea with the fleet of his antagonist.  But when the new governor
of Illyria, the Aulus Gabinius recalled by Caesar from exile,(46)
arrived by the landward route in Illyria in the winter of 706-707
with fifteen cohorts and 3000 horse, the system of warfare
changed.  Instead of confining himself like his predecessor
to war on a small scale, the bold active man undertook at once,
in spite of the inclement season, an expedition with his whole force
to the mountains.  But the unfavourable weather, the difficulty
of providing supplies, and the brave resistance of the Dalmatians,
swept away the army; Gabinius had to commence his retreat,
was attacked in the course of it and disgracefully defeated
by the Dalmatians, and with the feeble remains of his fine army
had difficulty in reaching Salonae, where he soon afterwards died.
Most of the Illyrian coast towns thereupon surrendered to the fleet
of Octavius; those that adhered to Caesar, such as Salonae
and Epidaurus (Ragusa vecchia), were so hard pressed by the fleet
at sea and by the barbarians on land, that the surrender
and capitulation of the remains of the army enclosed in Salonae
seemed not far distant.  Then the commandant of the depot at Brundisium,
the energetic Publius Vatinius, in the absence of ships of war caused
common boats to be provided with beaks and manned with the soldiers
dismissed from the hospitals, and with this extemporized
war-fleet gave battle to the far superior fleet of Octavius
at the island of Tauris (Torcola between Lesina and Curzola)--
a battle in which, as in so many cases, the bravery of the leader
and of the marines compensated for the deficiencies of the vessels,
and the Caesarians achieved a brilliant victory.  Marcus Octavius
left these waters and proceeded to Africa (spring of 707);
the Dalmatians no doubt continued their resistance for years
with great obstinacy, but it was nothing beyond a local mountain-warfare.
When Caesar returned from Egypt, his resolute adjutant had already got rid
of the danger that was imminent in Illyria.

Reorganization of the Coalition in Africa

All the more serious was the position of things in Africa,
where the constitutional party had from the outset of the civil war
ruled absolutely and had continually augmented their power.
Down to the battle of Pharsalus king Juba had, properly speaking,
borne rule there; he had vanquished Curio, and his flying horsemen
and his numberless archers were the main strength of the army;
the Pompeian governor Varus played by his side so subordinate
a part that he even had to deliver those soldiers of Curio,
who had surrendered to him, over to the king, and had to look on
while they were executed or carried away into the interior of Numidia.
After the battle of Pharsalus a change took place.  With the exception
of Pompeius himself, no man of note among the defeated party
thought of flight to the Parthians.  As little did they attempt to hold
the sea with their united resources; the warfare waged by Marcus Octavius
in the Illyrian waters was isolated, and was without permanent success.
The great majority of the republicans as of the Pompeians
betook themselves to Africa, where alone an honourable
and constitutional warfare might still be waged against the usurper.
There the fragments of the army scattered at Pharsalus, the troops
that had garrisoned Dyrrhachium, Corcyra, and the Peloponnesus,
the remains of the Illyrian fleet, gradually congregated;
there the second commander-in-chief Metellus Scipio,
the two sons of Pompeius, Gnaeus and Sextus, the political leader
of the republicans Marcus Cato, the able officers Labienus,
Afranius, Petreius, Octavius and others met.  If the resources
of the emigrants had diminished, their fanaticism had, if possible,
even increased.  Not only did they continue to murder their prisoners
and even the officers of Caesar under flag of truce, but king Juba,
in whom the exasperation of the partisan mingled with the fury
of the half-barbarous African, laid down the maxim that in every
community suspected of sympathizing with the enemy the burgesses
ought to be extirpated and the town burnt down, and even practically
carried out this theory against some townships, such as the unfortunate
Vaga near Hadrumetum.  In fact it was solely owing to the energetic
intervention of Cato that the capital of the province itself
the flourishing Utica--which, just like Carthage formerly,
had been long regarded with a jealous eye by the Numidian kings--
did not experience the same treatment from Juba, and that measures
of precaution merely were taken against its citizens,
who certainly were not unjustly accused of leaning towards Caesar.

As neither Caesar himself nor any of his lieutenants undertook
the smallest movement against Africa, the coalition had full time
to acquire political and military reorganization there.  First of all,
it was necessary to fill up anew the place of commander-in-chief
vacant by the death of Pompeius.  King Juba was not disinclined
still to maintain the position which he had held in Africa
up to the battle of Pharsalus; indeed he bore himself no longer
as a client of the Romans but as an equal ally or even as a protector,
and took it upon him, for example, to coin Roman silver money
with his name and device; nay, he even raised a claim to be the sole
wearer of purple in the camp, and suggested to the Roman commanders
that they should lay aside their purple mantle of office.
Further Metellus Scipio demanded the supreme command for himself,
because Pompeius had recognized him in the Thessalian campaign
as on a footing of equality, more from the consideration that he was
his son-in-law than on military grounds.  The like demand was raised
by Varus as the governor--self-nominated, it is true--of Africa,
seeing that the war was to be waged in his province.  Lastly the army
desired for its leader the propraetor Marcus Cato.  Obviously
it was right.  Cato was the only man who possessed the requisite
devotedness, energy, and authority for the difficult office;
if he was no military man, it was infinitely better to appoint
as commander-in-chief a non-military man who understood how to listen
to reason and make his subordinates act, than an officer of untried
capacity like Varus, or even one of tried incapacity like Metellus
Scipio.  But the decision fell at length on this same Scipio,
and it was Cato himself who mainly determined that decision.
He did so, not because he felt himself unequal to such a task,
or because his vanity found its account rather in declining
than in accepting; still less because he loved or respected Scipio,
with whom he on the contrary was personally at variance,
and who with his notorious inefficiency had attained a certain importance
merely in virtue of his position as father-in-law to Pompeius;
but simply and solely because his obstinate legal formalism chose
rather to let the republic go to ruin in due course of law
than to save it in an irregular way.  When after the battle of Pharsalus
he met with Marcus Cicero at Corcyra, he had offered to hand over
the command in Corcyra to the latter--who was still from the time
of his Cilician administration invested with the rank of general--
as the officer of higher standing according to the letter of the law,
and by this readiness had driven the unfortunate advocate,
who now cursed a thousand times his laurels from the Arnanus,
almost to despair; but he had at the same time astonished all men
of any tolerable discernment.  The same principles were applied now,
when something more was at stake; Cato weighed the question
to whom the place of commander-in-chief belonged, as if the matter
had reference to a field at Tusculum, and adjudged it to Scipio.
By this sentence his own candidature and that of Varus were set aside.
But he it was also, and he alone, who confronted with energy
the claims of king Juba, and made him feel that the Roman nobility
came to him not suppliant, as to the great-prince of the Parthians,
with a view to ask aid at the hands of a protector, but as entitled
to command and require aid from a subject.  In the present state
of the Roman forces in Africa, Juba could not avoid lowering
his claims to some extent; although he still carried the point
with the weak Scipio, that the pay of his troops should be charged
on the Roman treasury and the cession of the province of Africa
should be assured to him in the event of victory.

By the side of the new general-in-chief the senate of the "three hundred"
again emerged.  It established its seat in Utica, and replenished
its thinned ranks by the admission of the most esteemed
and the wealthiest men of the equestrian order.

The warlike preparations were pushed forward, chiefly through
the zeal of Cato, with the greatest energy, and every man capable
of arms, even the freedman and Libyan, was enrolled in the legions;
by which course so many hands were withdrawn from agriculture
that a great part of the fields remained uncultivated, but an imposing
result was certainly attained.  The heavy infantry numbered fourteen
legions, of which two were already raised by Varus, eight others
were formed partly from the refugees, partly from the conscripts
in the province, and four were legions of king Juba armed
in the Roman manner.  The heavy cavalry, consisting of the Celts
and Germans who arrived with Labienus and sundry others incorporated
in their ranks, was, apart from Juba's squadron of cavalry equipped
in the Roman style, 1600 strong.  The light troops consisted
of innumerable masses of Numidians riding without bridle or rein
and armed merely with javelins, of a number of mounted bowmen,
and a large host of archers on foot.  To these fell to be added Juba's
120 elephants, and the fleet of 55 sail commanded by Publius Varus
and Marcus Octavius.  The urgent want of money was in some measure
remedied by a self-taxation on the part of the senate, which was
the more productive as the richest African capitalists had been
induced to enter it.  Corn and other supplies were accumulated
in immense quantities in the fortresses capable of defence;
at the same time the stores were as far as possible removed
from the open townships.  The absence of Caesar, the troublesome temper
of his legions, the ferment in Spain and Italy gradually raised
men's spirits, and the recollection of the Pharsalian defeat
began to give way to fresh hopes of victory.

The time lost by Caesar in Egypt nowhere revenged itself
more severely than here.  Had he proceeded to Africa immediately
after the death of Pompeius, he would have found there a weak,
disorganized, and frightened army and utter anarchy among the leaders;
whereas there was now in Africa, owing more especially to Cato's energy,
an army equal in number to that defeated at Pharsalus, under leaders
of note, and under a regulated superintendence.

Movements in Spain

A peculiar evil star seemed altogether to preside over this African
expedition of Caesar.  He had, even before his embarkation for Egypt,
arranged in Spain and Italy various measures preliminary and preparatory
to the African war; but out of all there had sprung nothing but mischief.
From Spain, according to Caesar's arrangement, the governor
of the southern province Quintus Cassius Longinus was to cross
with four legions to Africa, to be joined there by Bogud
king of West Mauretania,(47) and to advance with him towards
Numidia and Africa.  But that army destined for Africa
included in it a number of native Spaniards and two whole legions
formerly Pompeian; Pompeian sympathies prevailed in the army
as in the province, and the unskilful and tyrannical behaviour
of the Caesarian governor was not fitted to allay them. A formal revolt
took place; troops and towns took part for or against the governor;
already those who had risen against the lieutenant of Caesar
were on the point of openly displaying the banner of Pompeius;
already had Pompeius' elder son Gnaeus embarked from Africa for Spain
to take advantage of this favourable turn, when the disavowal
of the governor by the most respectable Caesarians themselves
and the interference of the commander of the northern province
suppressed just in right time the insurrection.  Gnaeus Pompeius,
who had lost time on the way with a vain attempt to establish himself
in Mauretania, came too late; Gaius Trebonius, whom Caesar
after his return from the east sent to Spain to relieve Cassius
(autumn of 707), met everywhere with absolute obedience.  But of course
amidst these blunders nothing was done from Spain to disturb
the organization of the republicans in Africa; indeed in consequence
of the complications with Longinus, Bogud king of West Mauretania,
who was on Caesar's side and might at least have put some obstacles
in the way of king Juba, had been called away with his troops to Spain.

Military Revolt in Campania

Still more critical were the occurrences among the troops
whom Caesar had caused to be collected in southern Italy, in order
to his embarkation with them for Africa.  They were for the most part
the old legions, which had founded Caesar's throne in Gaul, Spain,
and Thessaly.  The spirit of these troops had not been improved
by victories, and had been utterly disorganized by long repose
in Lower Italy.  The almost superhuman demands which the general
made on them, and the effects of which were only too clearly apparent
in their fearfully thinned ranks, left behind even in these men of iron
a leaven of secret rancour which required only time and quiet
to set their minds in a ferment.  The only man who had influence
over them, had been absent and almost unheard-of for a year;
while the officers placed over them were far more afraid of the soldiers
than the soldiers of them, and overlooked in the conquerors
of the world every outrage against those that gave them quarters,
and every breach of discipline.  When the orders to embark for Sicily
arrived, and the soldier was to exchange the luxurious ease of Campania
for a third campaign certainly not inferior to those of Spain
and Thessaly in point of hardship, the reins, which had been
too long relaxed and were too suddenly tightened, snapt asunder.
The legions refused to obey till the promised presents
were paid to them, scornfully repulsed the officers sent by Caesar,
and even threw stones at them.  An attempt to extinguish the incipient
revolt by increasing the sums promised not only had no success,
but the soldiers set out in masses to extort the fulfilment
of the promises from the general in the capital.  Several officers,
who attempted to restrain the mutinous bands on the way, were slain.
It was a formidable danger.  Caesar ordered the few soldiers
who were in the city to occupy the gates, with the view of warding off
the justly apprehended pillage at least at the first onset,
and suddenly appeared among the furious bands demanding to know
what they wanted.  They exclaimed: "discharge."  In a moment
the request was granted.  Respecting the presents, Caesar added,
which he had promised to his soldiers at his triumph, as well as
respecting the lands which he had not promised to them
but had destined for them, they might apply to him on the day
when he and the other soldiers should triumph; in the triumph itself
they could not of course participate, as having been previously
discharged.  The masses were not prepared for things taking this turn;
convinced that Caesar could not do without them for the African campaign,
they had demanded their discharge only in order that, if it were refused,
they might annex their own conditions to their service.  Half unsettled
in their belief as to their own indispensableness; too awkward
to return to their object, and to bring the negotiation
which had missed its course back to the right channel; ashamed, as men,
by the fidelity with which the Imperator kept his word even to soldiers
who had forgotten their allegiance, and by his generosity
which even now granted far more than he had ever promised;
deeply affected, as soldiers, when the general presented to them
the prospect of their being necessarily mere civilian spectators
of the triumph of their comrades, and when he called them no longer
"comrades" but "burgesses,"--by this very form of address,
which from his mouth sounded so strangely, destroying as it were
with one blow the whole pride of their past soldierly career;
and, besides all this, under the spell of the man whose presence
had an irresistible power--the soldiers stood for a while mute
and lingering, till from all sides a cry arose that the general
would once more receive them into favour and again permit them
to be called Caesar's soldiers.  Caesar, after having allowed himself
to be sufficiently entreated, granted the permission; but the ringleaders
in this mutiny had a third cut off from their triumphal presents.
History knows no greater psychological masterpiece, and none
that was more completely successful.

Caesar Proceeds to Africa
Conflict at Ruspina

This mutiny operated injuriously on the African campaign,
at least in so far as it considerably delayed the commencement of it.
When Caesar arrived at the port of Lilybaeum destined for the embarkation
the ten legions intended for Africa werefar from being
fully assembled there, and it was the experienced troops
that were farthest behind.  Hardly however had six legions,
of which five were newly formed, arrived there and the necessary
war-vessels and transports come forward, when Caesar put to sea with them
(25 Dec. 707 of the uncorrected, about 8 Oct. of the Julian, calendar).
The enemy's fleet, which on account of the prevailing equinoctial gales
was drawn up on the beach at the island Aegimurus in front of the bay
of Carthage, did not oppose the passage; but, the same storms scattered
the fleet of Caesar in all directions, and, when he availed himself
of the opportunity of landing not far from Hadrumetum (Susa),
he could not disembark more than some 3000 men, mostly recruits,
and 150 horsemen.  His attempt to capture Hadrumetum strongly occupied
by the enemy miscarried; but Caesar possessed himself of the two seaports
not far distant from each other, Ruspina (Monastir near Susa)
and Little Leptis.  Here he entrenched himself; but his position
was so insecure, that he kept his cavalry in the ships and the ships
ready for sea and provided with a supply of water, in order to re-embark
at any moment if he should be attacked by a superior force.
This however was not necessary, for just at the right time the ships
that had been driven out of their course arrived (3 Jan. 708).
On the very following day Caesar, whose army in consequence
of the arrangements made by the Pompeians suffered from want of corn,
undertook with three legions an expedition into the interior
of the country, but was attacked on the march not far from Ruspina
by the corps which Labienus had brought up to dislodge Caesar
from the coast.  As Labienus had exclusively cavalry and archers,
and Caesar almost nothing but infantry of the line, the legions
were quickly surrounded and exposed to the missiles of the enemy,
without being able to retaliate or to attack with success.  No doubt
the deploying of the entire line relieved once more the flanks,
and spirited charges saved the honour of their arms; but a retreat
was unavoidable, and had Ruspina not been so near, the Moorish javelin
would perhaps have accomplished the same result here
as the Parthian bow at Carrhae.

Caesar's Position at Ruspina

Caesar, whom this day had fully convinced of the difficulty
of the impending war, would not again expose his soldiers untried
and discouraged by the new mode of fighting to any such attack,
but awaited the arrival of his veteran legions.  The interval
was employed in providing some sort of compensation against
the crushing superiority of the enemy in the weapons of distant warfare.
The incorporation of the suitable men from the fleet as light horsemen
or archers in the land-army could not be of much avail.  The diversions
which Caesar suggested were somewhat more effectual.  He succeeded
in bringing into arms against Juba the Gaetulian pastoral tribes
wandering on the southern slope of the great Atlas towards the Sahara;
for the blows of the Marian and Sullan period had reached even to them,
and their indignation against Pompeius, who had at that time made them
subordinate to the Numidian kings,(48) rendered them from the outset
favourably inclined to the heir of the mighty Marius of whose Jugurthine
campaign they had still a lively recollection.  The Mauretanian kings,
Bogud in Tingis and Bocchus in Iol, were Juba's natural rivals
and to a certain extent long since in alliance with Caesar.
Further, there still roamed in the border-region between the kingdoms
of Juba and Bocchus the last of the Catilinarians, that Publius Sittius
of Nuceria,(49) who eighteen years before had become converted
from a bankrupt Italian merchant into a Mauretanian leader
of free bands, and since that time had procured for himself
a name and a body of retainers amidst the Libyan quarrels.
Bocchus and Sittius united fell on the Numidian land, and occupied
the important town of Cirta; and their attack, as well as
that of the Gaetulians, compelled king Juba to send a portion
of his troops to his southern and western frontiers.

Caesar's situation, however, continued sufficiently unpleasant.
His army was crowded together within a space of six square miles;
though the fleet conveyed corn, the want of forage was as much felt
by Caesar's cavalry as by those of Pompeius before Dyrrhachium.
The light troops of the enemy remained notwithstanding all the exertions
of Caesar so immeasurably superior to his, that it seemed almost
impossible to carry offensive operations into the interior
even with veterans.  If Scipio retired and abandoned the coast towns,
he might perhaps achieve a victory like those which the vizier of Orodes
had won over Crassus and Juba over Curio, and he could at least
endlessly protract the war.  The simplest consideration suggested
this plan of campaign; even Cato, although far from a strategist,
counselled its adoption, and offered at the same time to cross
with a corps to Italy and to call the republicans there to arms--
which, amidst the utter confusion in that quarter, might very well
meet with success.  But Cato could only advise, not command; Scipio
the commander-in-chief decided that the war should be carried on
in the region of the coast.  This was a blunder, not merely inasmuch as
they thereby dropped a plan of war promising a sure result, but also
inasmuch as the region to which they transferred the war was in dangerous
agitation, and a good part of the army which they opposed to Caesar
was likewise in a troublesome temper.  The fearfully strict levy,
the carrying off of the supplies, the devastating of the smaller
townships, the feeling in general that they were being sacrificed
for a cause which from the outset was foreign to them
and was already lost, had exasperated the native population against
the Roman republicans fighting out their last struggle of despair
on African soil; and the terrorist proceedings of the latter against
all communities that were but suspected of indifference,(50)
had raised this exasperation to the most fearful hatred.
The African towns declared, wherever they could venture to do so,
for Caesar; among the Gaetulians and the Libyans, who served in numbers
among the light troops and even in the legions, desertion was spreading.
But Scipio with all the obstinacy characteristic of folly persevered
in his plan, marched with all his force from Utica to appear
before the towns of Ruspina and Little Leptis occupied by Caesar,
furnished Hadrumetum to the north and Thapsus to the south
(on the promontory Ras Dimas) with strong garrisons, and in concert
with Juba, who likewise appeared before Ruspina with all his troops
not required by the defence of the frontier, offered battle repeatedly
to the enemy.  But Caesar was resolved to wait for his veteran legions.
As these one after another arrived and appeared on the scene
of strife, Scipio and Juba lost the desire to risk a pitched battle,
and Caesar had no means of compelling them to fight owing
to their extraordinary superiority in light cavalry.  Nearly two months
passed away in marches and skirmishes in the neighbourhood
of Ruspina and Thapsus, which chiefly had relation to the finding out
of the concealed store-pits (silos) common in the country,
and to the extension of posts.  Caesar, compelled by the enemy's
horsemen to keep as much as possible to the heights or even to cover
his flanks by entrenched lines, yet accustomed his soldiers
gradually during this laborious and apparently endless warfare
to the foreign mode of fighting.  Friend and foe hardly recognized
the rapid general in the cautious master of fence who trained his men
carefully and not unfrequently in person; and they became almost puzzled
by the masterly skill which displayed itself as conspicuously
in delay as in promptitude of action.

Battle at Thapsus

At last Caesar, after being joined by his last reinforcements,
made a lateral movement towards Thapsus.  Scipio had, as we have said,
strongly garrisoned this town, and thereby committed the blunder
of presenting to his opponent an object of attack easy to be seized;
to this first error he soon added the second still less excusable
blunder of now for the rescue of Thapsus giving the battle,
which Caesar had wished and Scipio had hitherto rightly refused,
on ground which placed the decision in the hands of the infantry
of the line.  Immediately along the shore, opposite to Caesar's camp,
the legions of Scipio and Juba appeared, the fore ranks ready
for fighting, the hinder ranks occupied in forming an entrenched camp;
at the same time the garrison of Thapsus prepared for a sally.
Caesar's camp-guard sufficed to repulse the latter.  His legions,
accustomed to war, already forming a correct estimate of the enemy
from the want of precision in their mode of array and their
ill-closed ranks, compelled--while yet the entrenching was going forward
on that side, and before even the general gave the signal--
a trumpeter to sound for the attack, and advanced along the whole line
headed by Caesar himself, who, when he saw his men advance
without waiting for his orders, galloped forward to lead them
against the enemy.  The right wing, in advance of the other divisions,
frightened the line of elephants opposed to it--this was
the last great battle in which these animals were employed--
by throwing bullets and arrows, so that they wheeled round
on their own ranks.  The covering force was cut down, the left wing
of the enemy was broken, and the whole line was overthrown.
The defeat was the more destructive, as the new camp of the beaten army
was not yet ready, and the old one was at a considerable distance;
both were successively captured almost without resistance.  The mass
of the defeated army threw away their arms and sued for quarter;
but Caesar's soldiers were no longer the same who had readily refrained
from battle before Ilerda and honourably spared the defenceless
at Pharsalus.  The habit of civil war and the rancour left behind
by the mutiny asserted their power in a terrible manner
on the battlefield of Thapsus.  If the hydra with which they fought
always put forth new energies, if the army was hurried from Italy
to Spain, from Spain to Macedonia, from Macedonia to Africa, and if
the repose ever more eagerly longed for never came, the soldier sought,
and not wholly without cause, the reason of this state of things
in the unseasonable clemency of Caesar.  He had sworn to retrieve
the general's neglect, and remained deaf to the entreaties
of his disarmed fellow-citizens as well as to the commands of Caesar
and the superior officers.  The fifty thousand corpses that covered
the battle-field of Thapsus, among whom were several Caesarian officers
known as secret opponents of the new monarchy, and therefore
cut down on this occasion by their own men, showed how the soldier
procures for himself repose.  The victorious army on the other hand
numbered no more than fifty dead (6 April 708).

Cato in Utica
His Death

There was as little a continuance of the struggle in Africa
after the battle of Thapsus, as there had been a year and a half before
in the east after the defeat of Pharsalus.  Cato as commandant
of Utica convoked the senate, set forth how the means of defence stood,
and submitted it to the decision of those assembled whether
they would yield or defend themselves to the last man--
only adjuring them to resolve and to act not each one for himself,
but all in unison.  The more courageous view found several supporters;
it was proposed to manumit on behalf of the state the slaves
capable of arms, which however Cato rejected as an illegal encroachment
on private property, and suggested in its stead a patriotic appeal
to the slave-owners.  But soon this fit of resolution in an assembly
consisting in great part of African merchants passed off, and they agreed
to capitulate.  Thereupon when Faustus Sulla, son of the regent,
and Lucius Afranius arrived in Utica with a strong division
of cavalry from the field of battle, Cato still made an attempt
to hold the town through them; but he indignantly rejected their demand
to let them first of all put to death the untrustworthy citizens of Utica
en masse, and chose to let the last stronghold of the republicans fall
into the hands of the monarch without resistance rather than to profane
the last moments of the republic by such a massacre.  After he had--
partly by his authority, partly by liberal largesses--checked so far
as he could the fury of the soldiery against the unfortunate Uticans;
after he had with touching solicitude furnished to those who preferred
not to trust themselves to Caesar's mercy the means for flight,
and to those who wished to remain the opportunity of capitulating
under the most tolerable conditions, so far as his ability reached;
and after having thoroughly satisfied himself that he could render
to no one any farther aid, he held himself released from his command,
retired to his bedchamber, and plunged his sword into his breast.

The Leaders of the Republicans Put to Death

Of the other fugitive leaders only a few escaped.  The cavalry
that fled from Thapsus encountered the bands of Sittius,
and were cut down or captured by them; their leaders Afranius and Faustus
were delivered up to Caesar, and, when the latter did not order
their immediate execution, they were slain in a tumult by his veterans.
The commander-in-chief Metellus Scipio with the fleet of the defeated
party fell into the power of the cruisers of Sittius  and,
when they were about to lay hands on him, stabbed himself.  King Juba,
not unprepared for such an issue, had in that case resolved to die
in a way which seemed to him befitting a king, and had caused
an enormous funeral pile to be prepared in the market-place
of his city Zama, which was intended to consume along with his body
all his treasures and the dead bodies of the whole citizens of Zama.
But the inhabitants of the town showed no desire to let themselves
be employed by way of decoration for the funeral rites
of the African Sardanapalus; and they closed the gates against
the king when fleeing from the battle-field he appeared, accompanied
by Marcus Petreius, before their city.  The king--one of those natures
that become savage amidst a life of dazzling and insolent enjoyment,
and prepare for themselves even out of death an intoxicating feast--
resorted with his companion to one of his country houses,
caused a copious banquet to be served up, and at the close
of the feast challenged Petreius to fight him to death in single combat.
It was the conqueror of Catilina that received his death at the hand
of the king; the latter thereupon caused himself to be stabbed
by one of his slaves.  The few men of eminence that escaped,
such as Labienus and Sextus Pompeius, followed the elder brother
of the latter to Spain and sought, like Sertorius formerly,
a last refuge of robbers and pirates in the waters and the mountains
of that still half-independent land.

Regulation of Africa

Without resistance Caesar regulated the affairs of Africa.
As Curio had already proposed, the kingdom of Massinissa was broken up.
The most eastern portion or region of Sitifis was united with the kingdom
of Bocchus king of East Mauretania,(51) and the faithful king Bogud
of Tingis was rewarded with considerable gifts. Cirta (Constantine)
and the surrounding district, hitherto possessed under the supremacy
of Juba by the prince Massinissa and his son Arabion, were conferred
on the condottiere Publius Sittius that he might settle
his half-Roman bands there;(52) but at the same time this district,
as well as by far the largest and most fertile portion
of the late Numidian kingdom, were united as "New Africa"
with the older province of Africa, and the defence of the country
along the coast against the roving tribes of the desert,
which the republic had entrusted to a client-king, was imposed
by the new ruler on the empire itself.

The Victory of Monarchy

The struggle, which Pompeius and the republicans had undertaken
against the monarchy of Caesar, thus terminated, after having lasted
for four years, in the complete victory of the new monarch.
No doubt the monarchy was not established for the first time
on the battle-fields of Pharsalus and Thapsus; it might already
be dated from the moment when Pompeius and Caesar in league
had established their joint rule and overthrown the previous
aristocratic constitution.  Yet it was only those baptisms of blood
of the ninth August 706 and the sixth April 708 that set aside
the conjoint rule so opposed to the nature of absolute dominion,
and conferred fixed status and formal recognition on the new monarchy.
Risings of pretenders and republican conspiracies might ensue and provoke
new commotions, perhaps even new revolutions and restorations;
but the continuity of the free republic that had been uninterrupted
for five hundred years was broken through, and monarchy was established
throughout the range of the wide Roman empire by the legitimacy
of accomplished fact.

The End of the Republic

The constitutional struggle was at an end; and that it was so,
was proclaimed by Marcus Cato when he fell on his sword at Utica.
For many years he had been the foremost man in the struggle
of the legitimate republic against its oppressors; he had continued it,
long after he had ceased to cherish any hope of victory.
But now the struggle itself had become impossible; the republic
which Marcus Brutus had founded was dead and never to be revived;
what were the republicans now to do on the earth?  The treasure
was carried off, the sentinels were thereby relieved; who could
blame them if they departed?  There was more nobility, and above all
more judgment, in the death of Cato than there had been in his life.
Cato was anything but a great man; but with all that short-sightedness,
that perversity, that dry prolixity, and those spurious phrases
which have stamped him, for his own and for all time,
as the ideal of unreflecting republicanism and the favourite of all
who make it their hobby, he was yet the only man who honourably
and courageously championed in the last struggle the great system
doomed to destruction.  Just because the shrewdest lie feels itself
inwardly annihilated before the simple truth, and because
all the dignity and glory of human nature ultimately depend
not on shrewdness but on honesty, Cato has played a greater part
in history than many men far superior to him in intellect.
It only heightens the deep and tragic significance of his death
that he was himself a fool; in truth it is just because Don Quixote
is a fool that he is a tragic figure.  It is an affecting fact,
that on that world-stage, on which so many great and wise men
had moved and acted, the fool was destined to give the epilogue.
He too died not in vain.  It was a fearfully striking protest
of the republic against the monarchy, that the last republican went
as the first monarch came--a protest which tore asunder like gossamer
all that so-called constitutional character with which Caesar
invested his monarchy, and exposed in all its hypocritical falsehood
the shibboleth of the reconciliation of all parties, under the aegis
of which despotism grew up.  The unrelenting warfare which the ghost
of the legitimate republic waged for centuries, from Cassius
and Brutus down to Thrasea and Tacitus, nay, even far later,
against the Caesarian monarchy--a warfare of plots and of literature--
was the legacy which the dying Cato bequeathed to his enemies.
This republican opposition derived from Cato its whole attitude--
stately, transcendental in its rhetoric, pretentiously rigid,
hopeless, and faithful to death; and accordingly it began
even immediately after his death to revere as a saint the man
who in his lifetime was not unfrequently its laughing-stock
and its scandal.  But the greatest of these marks of respect
was the involuntary homage which Caesar rendered to him, when he made
an exception to the contemptuous clemency with which he was wont
to treat his opponents, Pompeians as well as republicans,
in the case of Cato alone, and pursued him even beyond the grave
with that energetic hatred which practical statesmen are wont to feel
towards antagonists opposing them from a region of ideas
which they regard as equally dangerous and impracticable.




Chapter XI

The Old Republic and the New Monarchy

Character of Caesar

The new monarch of Rome, the first ruler over the whole domain
of Romano-Hellenic civilization, Gaius Julius Caesar, was in his
fifty-sixth year (born 12 July 652?) when the battle at Thapsus,
the last link in a long chain of momentous victories, placed
the decision as to the future of the world in his hands.  Few men
have had their elasticity so thoroughly put to the proof as Caesar--
the sole creative genius produced by Rome, and the last produced
by the ancient world, which accordingly moved on in the path
that he marked out for it until its sun went down.  Sprung from one
of the oldest noble families of Latium--which traced back its lineage
to the heroes of the Iliad and the kings of Rome, and in fact
to the Venus-Aphrodite common to both nations--he spent the years
of his boyhood and early manhood as the genteel youth of that epoch
were wont to spend them.  He had tasted the sweetness as well as
the bitterness of the cup of fashionable life, had recited and declaimed,
had practised literature and made verses in his idle hours,
had prosecuted love-intrigues of every sort, and got himself
initiated into all the mysteries of shaving, curls, and ruffles
pertaining to the toilette-wisdom of the day, as well as
into the still more mysterious art of always borrowing and never paying.
But the flexible steel of that nature was proof against even
these dissipated and flighty courses; Caesar retained both
his bodily vigour and his elasticity of mind and of heart unimpaired.
In fencing and in riding he was a match for any of his soldiers,
and his swimming saved his life at Alexandria; the incredible rapidity
of his journeys, which usually for the sake of gaining time
were performed by night--a thorough contrast to the procession-like
slowness with which Pompeius moved from one place to another--
was the astonishment of his contemporaries and not the least
among the causes of his success.  The mind was like the body.
His remarkable power of intuition revealed itself in the precision
and practicability of all his arrangements, even where he gave orders
without having seen with his own eyes.  His memory was matchless,
and it was easy for him to carry on several occupations simultaneously
with equal self-possession.  Although a gentleman, a man of genius,
and a monarch, he had still a heart.  So long as he lived,
he cherished the purest veneration for his worthy mother Aurelia
(his father having died early); to his wives and above all
to his daughter Julia he devoted an honourable affection,
which was not without reflex influence even on political affairs.
With the ablest and most excellent men of his time, of high
and of humbler rank, he maintained noble relations of mutual fidelity,
with each after his kind.  As he himself never abandoned
any of his partisans after the pusillanimous and unfeeling manner
of Pompeius, but adhered to his friends--and that not merely
from calculation--through good and bad times without wavering,
several of these, such as Aulus Hirtius and Gaius Matius, gave,
even after his death, noble testimonies of their attachment to him.

If in a nature so harmoniously organized any one aspect of it
may be singled out as characteristic, it is this--that he stood aloof
from all ideology and everything fanciful.  As a matter of course,
Caesar was a man of passion, for without passion there is no genius;
but his passion was never stronger than he could control.
He had had his season of youth, and song, love, and wine had taken
lively possession of his spirit; but with him they did not penetrate
to the inmost core of his nature.  Literature occupied him long
and earnestly; but, while Alexander could not sleep for thinking
of the Homeric Achilles, Caesar in his sleepless hours mused
on the inflections of the Latin nouns and verbs.  He made verses,
as everybody then did, but they were weak; on the other hand
he was interested in subjects of astronomy and natural science.
While wine was and continued to be with Alexander the destroyer of care,
the temperate Roman, after the revels of his youth were over,
avoided it entirely.  Around him, as around all those
whom the full lustre of woman's love has dazzled in youth,
fainter gleams of it continued imperishably to linger;
even in later years he had love-adventures and successes with women,
and he retained a certain foppishness in his outward appearance,
or, to speak more correctly, the pleasing consciousness
of his own manly beauty.  He carefully covered the baldness,
which he keenly felt, with the laurel chaplet that he wore in public
in his later years, and he would doubtless have surrendered
some of his victories, if  he could thereby have brought back
his youthful locks.  But, however much even when monarch
he enjoyed the society of women, he only amused himself
with them, and allowed them no manner of influence over him;
even his much-censured relation to queen Cleopatra was only contrived
to mask a weak point in his political position.(1)  Caesar was thoroughly
a realist and a man of sense; and whatever he undertook
and achieved was pervaded and guided by the cool sobriety
which constitutes the most marked peculiarity of his genius.
To this he owed the power of living energetically in the present,
undisturbed either by recollection or by expectation; to this
he owed the capacity of acting at any moment with collected vigour,
and of applying his whole genius even to the smallest
and most incidental enterprise; to this he owed the many-sided power
with which he grasped and mastered whatever understanding can comprehend
and will can compel; to this he owed the self-possessed ease
with which he arranged his periods as well as projected his campaigns;
to this he owed the "marvellous serenity" which remained
steadily with him through good and evil days; to this he owed
the complete independence, which admitted of no control by favourite
or by mistress, or even by friend.  It resulted, moreover,
from this clearness of judgment that Caesar never formed to himself
illusions regarding the power of fate and the ability of man;
in his case the friendly veil was lifted up, which conceals from man
the inadequacy of his working.  Prudently as he laid his plans
and considered all possibilities, the feeling was never absent
from his breast that in all things fortune, that is to say accident,
must bestow success; and with this may be connected the circumstance
that he so often played a desperate game with destiny, and in particular
again and again hazarded his person with daring indifference.
As indeed occasionally men of predominant sagacity betake themselves
to a pure game of hazard, so there was in Caesar's rationalism a point
at which it came in some measure into contact with mysticism.

Caesar as a Statesman

Gifts such as these could not fail to produce a statesman.
From early youth, accordingly, Caesar was a statesman in the deepest
sense of the term, and his aim was the highest which man is allowed
to propose to himself--the political, military, intellectual,
and moral regeneration of his own deeply decayed nation,
and of the still more deeply decayed Hellenic nation intimately akin
to his own.  The hard school of thirty years' experience changed
his views as to the means by which this aim was to be reached; his aim
itself remained the same in the times of his hopeless humiliation
and of his unlimited plenitude of power, in the times when as demagogue
and conspirator he stole towards it by paths of darkness,
and in those when, as joint possessor of the supreme power
and then as monarch, he worked at his task in the full light of day
before the eyes of the world.  All the measures of a permanent kind
that proceeded from him at the most various times assume their
appropriate places in the great building-plan.  We cannot
therefore properly speak of isolated achievements of Caesar;
he did nothing isolated.  With justice men commend Caesar the orator
for his masculine eloquence, which, scorning all the arts
of the advocate, like a clear flame at once enlightened and warmed.
With justice men admire in Caesar the author the inimitable simplicity
of the composition, the unique purity and beauty of the language.
With justice the greatest masters of war of all times have praised
Caesar the general, who, in a singular degree disregarding routine
and tradition, knew always how to find out the mode of warfare
by which in the given case the enemy was conquered, and which
was thus in the given case the right one; who with the certainty
of divination found the proper means for every end; who after defeat
stood ready for battle like William of Orange, and ended the campaign
invariably with victory; who managed that element of warfare,
the treatment of which serves to distinguish military genius
from the mere ordinary ability of an officer--the rapid movement
of masses--with unsurpassed perfection, and found the guarantee
of victory not in the massiveness of his forces but in the celerity
of their movements, not in long preparation but in rapid
and daring action even with inadequate means.  But all these were
with Caesar mere secondary matters; he was no doubt a great orator,
author, and general, but he became each of these merely because
he was a consummate statesman.  The soldier more especially
played in him altogether an accessory part, and it is
one of the principal peculiarities by which he is distinguished
from Alexander, Hannibal, and Napoleon, that he began his political
activity not as an officer, but as a demagogue.  According
to his original plan he had purposed to reach his object, like Pericles
and Gaius Gracchus, without force of arms, and throughout eighteen years
he had as leader of the popular party moved exclusively amid
political plans and intrigues--until, reluctantly convinced
of the necessity for a military support, he, when already forty years
of age, put himself at the head of an army.  It was natural
that he should even afterwards remain still more statesman
than general--just like Cromwell, who also transformed himself
from a leader of opposition into a military chief and democratic king,
and who in general, little as the prince of Puritans seems to resemble
the dissolute Roman, is yet in his development as well as
in the objects which he aimed at and the results which he achieved
of all statesmen perhaps the most akin to Caesar.  Even in his mode
of warfare this improvised generalship may still be recognized;
the enterprises of Napoleon against Egypt and against England
do not more clearly exhibit the artillery-lieutenant who had risen
by service to command than the similar enterprises of Caesar exhibit
the demagogue metamorphosed into a general.  A regularly trained
officer would hardly have been prepared, through political
considerations of a not altogether stringent nature, to set aside
the best-founded military scruples in the way in which Caesar did
on several occasions, most strikingly in the case of his landing
in Epirus.  Several of his acts are therefore censurable
from a military point of view; but what the general loses,
the statesman gains.  The task of the statesman is universal
in its nature like Caesar's genius; if he undertook things
the most varied and most remote one from another, they had all
without exception a bearing on the one great object to which
with infinite fidelity and consistency he devoted himself;
and of the manifold aspects and directions of his great activity
he never preferred one to another.  Although a master of the art of war,
he yet from statesmanly considerations did his utmost to avert
civil strife and, when it nevertheless began, to earn laurels
stained as little as possible by blood.  Although the founder
of a military monarchy, he yet, with an energy unexampled in history,
allowed no hierarchy of marshals or government of praetorians
to come into existence.  If he had a preference for any one form
of services rendered to the state, it was for the sciences and arts
of peace rather than for those of war.

The most remarkable peculiarity of his action as a statesman
was its perfect harmony.  In reality all the conditions
for this most difficult of all human functions were united in Caesar.
A thorough realist, he never allowed the images of the past
or venerable tradition to disturb him; for him nothing was of value
in politics but the living present and the law of reason, just as
in his character of grammarian he set aside historical and antiquarian
research and recognized nothing but on the one hand the living
-usus loquendi- and on the other hand the rule of symmetry.
A born ruler, he governed the minds of men as the wind drives the clouds,
and compelled the most heterogeneous natures to place themselves
at his service--the plain citizen and the rough subaltern, the genteel
matrons of Rome and the fair princesses of Egypt and Mauretania,
the brilliant cavalry-officer and the calculating banker.
His talent for organization was marvellous; no statesman has ever
compelled alliances, no general has ever collected an army
out of unyielding and refractory elements with such decision,
and kept them together with such firmness, as Caesar displayed
in constraining and upholding his coalitions and his legions;
never did regent judge his instruments and assign each to the place
appropriate for him with so acute an eye.

He was monarch; but he never played the king.  Even when absolute
lord of Rome, he retained the deportment of the party-leader;
perfectly pliant and smooth, easy and charming in conversation,
complaisant towards every one, it seemed as if he wished to be
nothing but the first among his peers.  Caesar entirely avoided
the blunder into which so many men otherwise on an equality with him
have fallen, of carrying into politics the military tone of command;
however much occasion his disagreeable relations with the senate
gave for it, he never resorted to outrages such as was that
of the eighteenth Brumaire.  Caesar was monarch; but he was never
seized with the giddiness of the tyrant.  He is perhaps the only one
among the mighty ones of the earth, who in great matters and little
never acted according to inclination or caprice, but always
without exception according to his duty as ruler, and who,
when he looked back on his life, found doubtless erroneous calculations
to deplore, but no false step of passion to regret.  There is nothing
in the history of Caesar's life, which even on a small scale(2)
can be compared with those poetico-sensual ebullitions--such as
the murder of Kleitos or the burning of Persepolis--which the history
of his great predecessor in the east records.  He is, in fine,
perhaps the only one of those mighty ones, who has preserved
to the end of his career the statesman's tact of discriminating between
the possible and the impossible, and has not broken down in the task
which for greatly gifted natures is the most difficult of all--
the task of recognizing, when on the pinnacle of success,
its natural limits.  What was possible he performed, and never left
the possible good undone for the sake of the impossible better,
never disdained at least to mitigate by palliatives evils
that were incurable.  But where he recognized that fate had spoken,
he always obeyed.  Alexander on the Hypanis, Napoleon at Moscow,
turned back because they were compelled to do so, and were indignant
at destiny for bestowing even on its favourites merely limited successes;
Caesar turned back voluntarily on the Thames and on the Rhine;
and thought of carrying into effect even at the Danube and the Euphrates
not unbounded plans of world-conquest, but merely well-considered
frontier-regulations.

Such was this unique man, whom it seems so easy and yet is so infinitely
difficult to describe.  His whole nature is transparent clearness;
and tradition preserves more copious and more vivid information
about him than about any of his peers in the ancient world.
Of such a personage our conceptions may well vary in point
of shallowness or depth, but they cannot be, strictly speaking,
different; to every not utterly perverted inquirer the grand figure
has exhibited the same essential features, and yet no one
has succeeded in reproducing it to the life.  The secret lies
in its perfection.  In his character as a man as well as in his place
in history, Caesar occupies a position where the great contrasts
of existence meet and balance each other.  Of mighty creative power
and yet at the same time of the most penetrating judgment;
no longer a youth and not yet an old man; of the highest energy of will
and the highest capacity of execution; filled with republican ideals
and at the same time born to be a king; a Roman in the deepest essence
of his nature, and yet called to reconcile and combine in himself
as well as in the outer world the Roman and the Hellenic
types of culture--Caesar was the entire and perfect man.
Accordingly we miss in him more than in any other historical personage
what are called characteristic features, which are in reality
nothing else than deviations from the natural course of human development.
What in Caesar passes for such at the first superficial glance is,
when more closely observed, seen to be the peculiarity
not of the individual, but of the epoch of culture or of the nation;
his youthful adventures, for instance, were common to him
with all his more gifted contemporaries of like position,
his unpoetical but strongly logical temperament was the temperament
of Romans in general.  It formed part also of Caesar's full humanity
that he was in the highest degree influenced by the conditions
of time and place; for there is no abstract humanity--
the living man cannot but occupy a place in a given nationality
and in a definite line of culture.  Caesar was a perfect man
just because he more than any other placed himself amidst
the currents of his time, and because he more than any other possessed
the essential peculiarity of the Roman nation--practical aptitude
as a citizen--in perfection: for his Hellenism in fact was only
the Hellenism which had been long intimately blended with the Italian
nationality.  But in this very circumstance lies the difficulty,
we may perhaps say the impossibility, of depicting Caesar to the life.
As the artist can paint everything save only consummate beauty,
so the historian, when once in a thousand years he encounters
the perfect, can only be silent regarding it.  For normality admits
doubtless of being expressed, but it gives us only the negative notion
of the absence of defect; the secret of nature, whereby
in her most finished manifestations normality and individuality
are combined, is beyond expression.  Nothing is left for us
but to deem those fortunate who beheld this perfection, and to gain
some faint conception of it from the reflected lustre which rests
imperishably on the works that were the creation of this great nature.
These also, it is true, bear the stamp of the time.  The Roman hero
himself stood by the side of his youthful Greek predecessor
not merely as an equal, but as a superior; but the world had meanwhile
become old and its youthful lustre had faded.  The action of Caesar
was no longer, like that of Alexander, a joyous marching onward
towards a goal indefinitely remote; he built on, and out of, ruins,
and was content to establish himself as tolerably and as securely
as possible within the ample but yet definite bounds once assigned
to him.  With reason therefore the delicate poetic tact
of the nations has not troubled itself about the unpoetical Roman,
and on the other hand has invested the son of Philip with all
the golden lustre of poetry, with all the rainbow hues of legend.
But with equal reason the political life of the nations has during
thousands of years again and again reverted to the lines
which Caesar drew; and the fact, that the peoples to whom the world
belongs still at the present day designate the highest of their monarchs
by his name, conveys a warning deeply significant and, unhappily,
fraught with shame.

Setting Aside of the Old Parties

If the old, in every respect vicious, state of things was to be
successfully got rid of and the commonwealth was to be renovated,
it was necessary first of all that the country should be
practically tranquillized and that the ground should be cleared
from the rubbish with which since the recent catastrophe it was
everywhere strewed.  In this work Caesar set out from the principle
of the reconciliation of the hitherto subsisting parties or,
to put it more correctly--for, where the antagonistic principles
are irreconcilable, we cannot speak of real reconciliation--
from the principle that the arena, on which the nobility and the populace
had hitherto contended with each other, was to be abandoned
by both parties, and that both were to meet together on the ground
of the new monarchical constitution.  First of all therefore
all the older quarrels of the republican past were regarded as done away
for ever and irrevocably.  While Caesar gave orders that the statues
of Sulla which had been thrown down by the mob of the capital
on the news of the battle of Pharsalus should be re-erected, and thus
recognized the fact that it became history alone to sit in judgment
on that great man, he at the same time cancelled the last remaining
effects of Sulla's exceptional laws, recalled from exile those
who had been banished in the times of the Cinnan and Sertorian troubles,
and restored to the children of those outlawed by Sulla
their forfeited privilege of eligibility to office.  In like manner
all those were restored, who in the preliminary stage of the recent
catastrophe had lost their seat in the senate or their civil existence
through sentence of the censors or political process, especially
through the impeachments raised on the basis of the exceptional laws
of 702.  Those alone who had put to death the proscribed
for money remained, as was reasonable, still under attainder;
and Milo, the most daring condottiere of the senatorial party,
was excluded from the general pardon.

Discontent of the Democrats

Far more difficult than the settlement of these questions
which already belonged substantially to the past was the treatment
of the parties confronting each other at the moment--on the one hand
Caesar's own democratic adherents, on the other hand the overthrown
aristocracy.  That the former should be, if possible, still less
satisfied than the latter with Caesar's conduct after the victory
and with his summons to abandon the old standing-ground of party,
was to be expected.  Caesar himself desired doubtless on the whole
the same issue which Gaius Gracchus had contemplated; but the designs
of the Caesarians were no longer those of the  Gracchans.
The Roman popular party had been driven onward in gradual progression
from reform to revolution, from revolution to anarchy, from anarchy
to a war against property; they celebrated among themselve
the memory of the reign of terror and now adorned the tomb
of Catilina, as formerly that of the Gracchi, with flowers
and garlands; they had placed themselves under Caesar's banner,
because they expected him to do for them what Catilina
had not been able to accomplish.  But as it speedily became plain
that Caesar was very far from intending to be the testamentary
executor of Catilina, and that the utmost which debtors might expect
from him was some alleviations of payment and modifications
of procedure, indignation found loud vent in the inquiry.
For whom then had the popular party conquered, if not for the people?
And the rabble of this description, high and low, out of pure chagrin
at the miscarriage of their politico-economic Saturnalia began first
to coquet with the Pompeians, and then even during Caesar's absence
of nearly two years from Italy (Jan. 706-autumn 707) to instigate there
a second civil war within the first.

Caelius and Milo

The praetor Marcus Caelius Rufus, a good aristocrat and bad payer
of debts, of some talent and much culture, as a vehement
and fluent orator hitherto in the senate and in the Forum
one of the most zealous champions for Caesar, proposed to the people--
without being instructed from any higher quarter to do so--
a law which granted to debtors a respite of six years free of interest,
and then, when he was opposed in this step, proposed a second law
which even cancelled all claims arising out of loans and current
house rents; whereupon the Caesarian senate deposed him from his office.
It was just on the eve of the battle of Pharsalus, and the balance
in the great contest seemed to incline to the side of the Pompeians;
Rufus entered into communication with the old senatorian
band-leader Milo, and the two contrived a counter-revolution,
which inscribed on its banner partly the republican constitution,
partly the cancelling of creditors' claims and the manumission of slaves.
Milo left his place of exile Massilia, and called the Pompeians
and the slave-herdsmen to arms in the region of Thurii; Rufus made
arrangements to seize the town of Capua by armed slaves.
But the latter plan was detected before its execution and frustrated
by the Capuan militia; Quintus Pedius, who advanced with a legion
into the territory of Thurii, scattered the band making havoc there;
and the fall of the two leaders put an end to the scandal (706).

Dolabella

Nevertheless there was found in the following year (707) a second fool,
the tribune of the people, Publius Dolabella, who, equally insolvent
but far from being equally gifted with his predecessor,
introduced afresh his law as to creditors' claims and house rents,
and with his colleague Lucius Trebellius began on that point once more--
it was the last time--the demagogic war; there were serious frays
between the armed bands on both sides and various street-riots,
till the commandant of Italy Marcus Antonius ordered the military
to interfere, and soon afterwards Caesar's return from the east
completely put an end to the preposterous proceedings.
Caesar attributed to these brainless attempts to revive the projects
of Catilina so little importance, that he tolerated Dolabella in Italy
and indeed after some time even received him again into favour.
Against a rabble of this sort, which had nothing to do with
any political question at all, but solely with a war against property--
as against gangs of banditti--the mere existence of a strong government
is sufficient; and Caesar was too great and too considerate
to busy himself with the apprehensions which the Italian alarmists
felt regarding these communists of that day, and thereby unduly
to procure a false popularity for his monarchy.

Measures against Pompeians and Republicans

While Caesar thus might leave, and actually left, the late democratic
party to the process of decomposition which had already in its case
advanced almost to the utmost limit, he had on the other hand,
with reference to the former aristocratic party possessing
a far greater vitality, not to bring about its dissolution--
which time alone could accomplish--but to pave the way for
and initiate it by a proper combination of repression and conciliation.
Among minor measures, Caesar, even from a natural sense of propriety,
avoided exasperating the fallen party by empty sarcasm;
he did not triumph over his conquered fellow-burgesses;(3)
he mentioned Pompeius often and always with respect, and caused
his statue overthrown by the people to be re-erected at the senate-
house, when the latter was restored, in its earlier distinguished place.
To political prosecutions after the victory Caesar assigned
the narrowest possible limits.  No investigation was instituted
into the various communications which the constitutional party
had held even with nominal Caesarians; Caesar threw the piles of papers
found in the enemy's headquarters at Pharsalus and Thapsus
into the fire unread, and spared himself and the country from political
processes against individuals suspected of high treason.  Further,
all the common soldiers who had followed their Roman or provincial
officers into the contest against Caesar came off with impunity.
The sole exception made was in the case of those Roman burgesses,
who had taken service in the army of the Numidian king Juba;
their property was confiscated by way of penalty for their treason.
Even to the officers of the conquered party Caesar had granted
unlimited pardon up to the close of the Spanish campaign of 705;
but he became convinced that in this he had gone too far,
and that the removal at least of the leaders among them was inevitable.
The rule by which he was thenceforth guided was, that every one
who after the capitulation of Ilerda had served as an officer
in the enemy's army or had sat in the opposition-senate, if he survived
the close of the struggle, forfeited his property and his political
rights, and was banished from Italy for life; if he did not survive
the close of the struggle, his property at least fell to the state;
but any one of these, who had formerly accepted pardon from Caesar
and was once more found in the ranks of the enemy, thereby
forfeited his life.  These rules were however materially modified
in the execution.  The sentence of death was actually executed
only against a very few of the numerous backsliders.  In the confiscation
of the property of the fallen not only were the debts attaching
to the several portions of the estate as well as the claims
of the widows for their dowries paid off, as was reasonable.
But a portion of the paternal estate was left also to the children
of the deceased.  Lastly not a few of those, who in consequence
of those rules were liable to banishment and confiscation of property,
were at once pardoned entirely or got off with fines, like the African
capitalists who were impressed as members of the senate of Utica.
And even the others almost without exception got their freedom
and property restored to them, if they could only prevail
on themselves to petition Caesar to that effect; on several
who declined to do so, such as the consular Marcus Marcellus,
pardon was even conferred unasked, and ultimately in 710
a general amnesty was issued for all who were still unrecalled.

Amnesty

The republican opposition submitted to be pardoned;
but it was not reconciled.  Discontent with the new order of things
and exasperation against the unwonted ruler were general.
For open political resistance there was indeed no farther opportunity--
it was hardly worth taking into account, that some oppositional
tribunes on occasion of the question of title acquired for themselves
the republican crown of martyrdom by a demonstrative intervention
against those who had called Caesar king--but republicanism
found expression all the more decidedly as an opposition of sentiment,
and in secret agitation and plotting. Not a hand stirred
when the Imperator appeared in public.  There was abundance
of wall-placards and sarcastic verses full of bitter and telling
popular satire against the new monarchy.  When a comedian
ventured on a republican allusion, he was saluted with the loudest
applause.  The praise of Cato formed the fashionable theme
of oppositional pamphleteers, and their writings found a public
all the more grateful because even literature was no longer free.
Caesar indeed combated the republicans even now on their own field;
he himself and his abler confidants replied to the Cato-literature
with Anticatones, and the republican and Caesarian scribes
fought round the dead hero of Utica like the Trojans and Hellenes
round the dead body of Patroclus; but as a matter of course
in this conflict--where the public thoroughly republican in its feelings
was judge--the Caesarians had the worst of it.  No course remained
but to overawe the authors; on which account men well known
and dangerous in a literary point of view, such as Publius
Nigidius Figulus and Aulus Caecina, had more difficulty
in obtaining permission to return to Italy than other exiles,
while the oppositional writers tolerated in Italy were subjected
to a practical censorship, the restraints of which were all the more
annoying that the measure of punishment to be dreaded
was utterly arbitrary.(4)  The underground machinations
of the overthrown parties against the new monarchy will be more fitly
set forth in another connection.  Here it is sufficient to say
that risings of pretenders as well as of republicans were incessantly
brewing throughout the Roman empire; that the flames of civil war kindled
now by the Pompeians, now by the republicans, again burst forth brightly
at various places; and that in the capital there was perpetual
conspiracy against the life of the monarch.  But Caesar
could not be induced by these plots even to surround himself
permanently with a body-guard, and usually contented himself
with making known the detected conspiracies by public placards.

Bearing of Caesar towards the Parties

However much Caesar was wont to treat all things relating
to his personal safety with daring indifference, he could not possibly
conceal from himself the very serious danger with which this mass
of malcontents threatened not merely himself but also his creations.
If nevertheless, disregarding all the warning and urgency
of his friends, he without deluding himself as to the implacability
of the very opponents to whom he showed mercy, persevered
with marvellous composure and energy in the course of pardoning
by far the greater number of them, he did so neither
from the chivalrous magnanimity of a proud, nor from the sentimental
clemency of an effeminate, nature, but from the correct statesmanly
consideration that vanquished parties are disposed of
more rapidly and with less public injury by their absorption
within the state than by any attempt to extirpate them by proscription
or to eject them from the commonwealth by banishment.  Caesar could not
for his high objects dispense with the constitutional party itself,
which in fact embraced not the aristocracy merely but all the elements
of a free and national spirit among the Italian burgesses;
for his schemes, which contemplated the renovation of the antiquated
state, he needed the whole mass of talent, culture, hereditary,
and self-acquired distinction, which this party embraced;
and in this sense he may well have named the pardoning of his opponents
the finest reward of victory.  Accordingly the most prominent chiefs
of the defeated parties were indeed removed, but full pardon
was not withheld from the men of the second and third rank
and especially of the younger generation; they were not, however,
allowed to sulk in passive opposition, but were by more or less
gentle pressure induced to take an active part in the new administration,
and to accept honours and offices from it.  As with Henry the Fourth
and William of Orange, so with Caesar his greatest difficulties began
only after the victory.  Every revolutionary conqueror learns
by experience that, if after vanquishing his opponents he would
not remain like Cinna and Sulla a mere party-chief, but would
like Caesar, Henry the Fourth, and William of Orange substitute
the welfare of the commonwealth for the necessarily one-sided programme
of his own party, for the moment all parties, his own as well as
the vanquished, unite against the new chief; and the more so,
the more great and pure his idea of his new vocation.  The friends
of the constitution and the Pompeians, though doing homage
with the lips to Caesar, bore yet in heart a grudge either
at monarchy or at least at the dynasty; the degenerate democracy
was in open rebellion against Caesar from the moment of its perceiving
that Caesar's objects were by no means its own; even the personal
adherents of Caesar murmured, when they found that their chief was
establishing instead of a state of condottieri a monarchy equal
and just towards all, and that the portions of gain accruing to them
were to be diminished by the accession of the vanquished.
This settlement of the commonwealth was acceptable to no party,
and had to be imposed on his associates no less than on his opponents.
Caesar's own position was now in a certain sense more imperilled
than before the victory; but what he lost, the state gained.
By annihilating the parties and not simply sparing the partisans
but allowing every man of talent or even merely of good descent
to attain to office irrespective of his political past, he gained
for his great building all the working power extant in the state;
and not only so, but the voluntary or compulsory participation of men
of all parties in the same work led the nation also over imperceptibly
to the newly prepared ground.  The fact that this reconciliation
of the parties was for the moment only externaland that they were
for the present much less agreed in adherence to the new state of things
than in hatred against Caesar, did not mislead him; he knew well
that antagonisms lose their keenness when brought into such outward union,
and that only in this way can the statesman anticipate the work of time,
which alone is able finally to heal such a strife by laying
the old generation in the grave.  Still less did he inquire who hated him
or meditated his assassination.  Like every genuine statesman he served
not the people for reward--not even for the reward of their love--
but sacrificed the favour of his contemporaries for the blessing
of posterity, and above all for the permission to save
and renew his nation.

Caesar's Work

In attempting to give a detailed account of the mode in which
the transition was effected from the old to the new state of things,
we must first of all recollect that Caesar came not to begin,
but to complete.  The plan of a new polity suited to the times,
long ago projected by Gaius Gracchus, had been maintained
by his adherents and successors with more or less of spirit and success,
but without wavering.  Caesar, from the outset and as it were
by hereditary right the head of the popular party, had for thirty years
borne aloft its banner without ever changing or even so much
as concealing his colours; he remained democrat even when monarch.
as he accepted without limitation, apart of course from the preposterous
projects of Catilina and Clodius, the heritage of his party;
as he displayed the bitterest, even personal, hatred to the aristocracy
and the genuine aristocrats; and as he retained unchanged
the essential ideas of Roman democracy, viz. alleviation of the burdens
of debtors, transmarine colonization, gradual equalization
of the differences of rights among the classes belonging
to the state, emancipation of the executive power from the senate:
his monarchy was so little at variance with democracy,
that democracy on the contrary only attained its completion
and fulfilment by means of that monarchy.  For this monarchy
was not the Oriental despotism of divine right, but a monarchy such as
Gaius Gracchus wished to found, such as Pericles and Cromwell founded--
the representation of the nation by the man in whom it puts
supreme and unlimited confidence.  The ideas, which lay
at the foundation of Caesar's work, were so far not strictly new;
but to him belongs their realization, which after all is everywhere
the main matter; and to him pertains the grandeur of execution,
which would probably have surprised the brilliant projector himself
if he could have seen it, and which has impressed, and will
always impress, every one to whom it has been presented in the living
reality or in the mirror of history--to whatever historical epoch
or whatever shade of politics he may belong--according
to the measure of his ability to comprehend human and historical
greatness, with deep and ever-deepening emotion and admiration.

At this point however it is proper expressly once for all to claim
what the historian everywhere tacitly presumes, and to protest
against the custom--common to simplicity and perfidy--of using
historical praise and historical censure, dissociated
from the given circumstances, as phrases of general application,
and in the present case of construing the judgment as to Caesar
into a judgment as to what is called Caesarism.  It is true
that the history of past centuries ought to be the instructress
of the present; but not in the vulgar sense, as if one could simply
by turning over the leaves discover the conjunctures of the present
in the records of the past, and collect from these the symptoms
for a political diagnosis and the specifics for a prescription;
it is instructive only so far as the observation of older forms
of culture reveals the organic conditions of civilization generally--
the fundamental forces everywhere alike, and the manner of their
combination everywhere different--and leads and encourages men,
not to unreflecting imitation, but to independent reproduction.
In this sense the history of Caesar and of Roman Imperialism,
with all the unsurpassed greatness of the master-worker,
with all the historical necessity of the work, is in truth
a sharper censure of modern autocracy than could be written
by the hand of man.  According to the same law of nature in virtue
of which the smallest organism infinitely surpasses the most artistic
machine, every constitution however defective which gives play
to the free self-determination of a majority of citizens infinitely
surpasses the most brilliant and humane absolutism; for the former
is capable of development and therefore living, the latter is what it is
and therefore dead.  This law of nature has verified itself
in the Roman absolute military monarchy and verified itself
all the more completely, that, under the impulse of its creator's genius
and in the absence of all material complications from without,
that monarchy developed itself more purely and freely
than any similar state.  From Caesar's time, as the sequel will show
and Gibbon has shown long ago, the Roman system had only an external
coherence and received only a mechanical extension, while internally
it became even with him utterly withered and dead.  If in the early
stages of the autocracy and above all in Caesar's own soul(5)
the hopeful dream of a combination of free popular development
and absolute rule was still cherished, the government of the highly-
gifted emperors of the Julian house soon taught men in a terrible form
how far it was possible to hold fire and water in the same vessel.
Caesar's work was necessary and salutary, not because it was
or could be fraught with blessing in itself, but because--
with the national organization of antiquity, which was based on slavery
and was utterly a stranger to republican-constitutional representation,
and in presence of the legitimate urban constitution which in the course
of five hundred years had ripened into oligarchic absolutism--
absolute military monarchy was the copestone logically necessary
and the least of evils.  When once the slave-holding aristocracy
in Virginia and the Carolinas shall have carried matters as far as
their congeners in the Sullan Rome, Caesarism will there too
be legitimized at the bar of the spirit of history;(6)
where it appears under other conditions of development, it is at once
a caricature and a usurpation.  But history will not submit
to curtail the true Caesar of his due honour, because her verdict
may in the presence of bad Caesars lead simplicity astray
and may give to roguery occasion for lying and fraud.  She too
is a Bible, and if she cannot any more than the Bible hinder the fool
from misunderstanding and the devil from quoting her, she too will
be able to bear with, and to requite, them both.

Dictatorship

The position of the new supreme head of the state appears formally,
at least in the first instance, as a dictatorship.  Caesar took
it up at first after his return from Spain in 705, but laid it down
again after a few days, and waged the decisive campaign of 706
simply as consul--this was the office his tenure of which was
the primary occasion for the outbreak of the civil war.(7)
but in the autumn of this year after the battle of Pharsalus
he reverted to the dictatorship and had it repeatedly entrusted to him,
at first for an undefined period, but from the 1st January 709
as an annual office, and then in January or February 710(8)
for the duration of his life, so that he in the end expressly dropped
the earlier reservation as to his laying down the office and gave
formal expression to its tenure for life in the new title of -dictator
perpetuus-.  This dictatorship, both in its first ephemeral
and in its second enduring tenure, was not that of the old constitution,
but--what was coincident with this merely in the name--the supreme
exceptional office as arranged by Sulla;(9) an office,
the functions of which were fixed, not by the constitutional ordinances
regarding the supreme single magistracy, but by special decree
of the people, to such an effect that the holder received,
in the commission to project laws and to regulate the commonwealth,
an official prerogative de jure unlimited which superseded
the republican partition of powers.  Those were merely applications
of this general prerogative to the particular case, when the holder
of power was further entrusted by separate acts with the right
of deciding on war and peace without consulting the senate
and the people, with the independent disposal of armies and finances,
and with the nomination of the provincial governors.  Caesar could
accordingly de jure assign to himself even such prerogatives
as lay outside of the proper functions of the magistracy and even
outside of the province of state-powers at all;(10) and it appears
almost as a concession on his part, that he abstained from nominating
the magistrates instead of the Comitia and limited himself to claiming
a binding right of proposal for a proportion of the praetors
and of the lower magistrates; and that he moreover had himself
empowered by special decree of the people for the creation of patricians,
which was not at all allowable according to use and wont.

Other Magistracies and Attributions

For other magistracies in the proper sense there remained alongside
of this dictatorship no room; Caesar did not take up the censorship
as such,(11) but he doubtless exercised censorial rights--
particularly the important right of nominating senators--after
a comprehensive fashion.

He held the consulship frequently alongside of the dictatorship,
once even without colleague; but he by no means attached it permanently
to his person, and he gave no effect to the calls addressed to him
to undertake it for five or even for ten years in succession.

Caesar had no need to have the superintendence of worship
now committed to him, since he was already -pontifex maximus-.(12)
as a matter of course the membership of the college of augurs
was conferred on him, and generally an abundance of old and new
honorary rights, such as the title of a "father of the fatherland,"
the designation of the month of his birth by the name which it
still bears of Julius, and other manifestations of the incipient
courtly tone which ultimately ran into utter deification.
Two only of the arrangements deserve to be singled out:
namely that Caesar was placed on the same footing with the tribunes
of the people as regards their special personal inviolability,
and that the appellation of Imperator was permanently attached
to his person and borne by him as a title alongside of
his other official designations.

Men of judgment will not require any proof, either that Caesar
intended to engraft on the commonwealth his supreme power,
and this not merely for a few years or even as a personal office
for an indefinite period somewhat like Sulla's regency,
but as an essential and permanent organ; or that he selected
for the new institution an appropriate and simple designation;
for, if it is a political blunder to create names without substantial
meaning, it is scarcely a less error to set up the substance
of plenary power without a name.  Only it is not easy to determine
what definitive formal shape Caesar had in view; partly because
in this period of transition the ephemeral and the permanent buildings
are not clearly discriminated from each other, partly because
the devotion of his clients which already anticipated the nod
of their master loaded him with a multitude--offensive doubtless
to himself--of decrees of confidence and laws conferring honours.
Least of all could the new monarchy attach itself to the consulship,
just on account of the collegiate character that could not well
be separated from this office; Caesar also evidently laboured
to degrade this hitherto supreme magistracy into an empty title,
and subsequently, when he undertook it, he did not hold it
through the whole year, but before the year expired gave it away
to personages of secondary rank.  The dictatorship came practically
into prominence most frequently and most definitely, but probably
only because Caesar wished to use it in the significance which it had
of old in the constitutional machinery--as an extraordinary presidency
for surmounting extraordinary crises.  On the other hand it was
far from recommending itself as an expression for the new monarchy,
for the magistracy was inherently clothed with an exceptional
and unpopular character, and it could hardly be expected
of the representative of the democracy that he should choose
for its permanent organization that form, which the most gifted champion
of the opposing party had created for his own ends.

The new name of Imperator, on the other hand, appears in every respect
by far more appropriate for the formal expression of the monarchy;
just because it is in this application(13) new, and no definite
outward occasion for its introduction is apparent. The new wine
might not be put into old bottles; here is a new name for the new thing,
and that name most pregnantly sums up what the democratic party
had already expressed in the Gabinian law, only with less precision,
as the function of its chief--the concentration and perpetuation
of official power (-imperium-) in the hands of a popular chief
independent of the senate.  We find on Caesar's coins,
especially those of the last period, alongside of the dictatorship
the title of Imperator prevailing, and in Caesar's law
as to political crimes the monarch seems to have been designated
by this name.  Accordingly the following times, though not immediately,
connected the monarchy with the name of Imperator.  To lend
to this new office at once a democratic and religious sanction,
Caesar probably intended to associate with it once for all
on the one hand the tribunician power, on the other
the supreme pontificate.

That the new organization was not meant to be restricted merely
to the lifetime of its founder, is beyond doubt; but he did not succeed
in settling the especially difficult question of the succession,
and it must remain an undecided point whether he had it in view
to institute some sort of form for the election of a successor,
such as had subsisted in the case of the original  kingly office,
or whether he wished to introduce for the supreme office
not merely the tenure for life but also the hereditary character,
as his adopted son subsequently maintained.(14)  It is not improbable
that he had the intention of combining in some measure the two systems,
and of arranging the succession, similarly to the course
followed by Cromwell and by Napoleon, in such a way that the ruler
should be succeeded in rule by his son, but, if he had no son,
or the son should not seem fitted for the succession, the ruler should
of his free choice nominate his successor in the form of adoption.

In point of state law the new office of Imperator was based
on the position which the consuls or proconsuls occupied
outside of the -pomerium-, so that primarily the military command,
but, along with this, the supreme judicial and consequently
also the administrative power, were included in it.(15)
But the authority of the Imperator was qualitatively superior
to the consular-proconsular, in so far as the former was not limited
as respected time or space, but was held for life and operative also
in the capital;(16) as the Imperator could not, while the consul could,
be checked by colleagues of equal power; and as all the restrictions
placed in course of time on the original supreme official power--
especially the obligation to give place to the -provocatio-
and to respect the advice of the senate--did not apply
to the Imperator.

Re-establishment of the Regal Office

In a word, this new office of Imperator was nothing else
than the primitive regal office re-established; for it was
those very restrictions--as respected the temporal and local
limitation of power, the collegiate arrangement, and the cooperation
of the senate or the community that was necessary for certain cases--
which distinguished the consul from the king.(17)  There is hardly
a trait of the new monarchy which was not found in the old:
the union of the supreme military, judicial, and administrative authority
in the hands of the prince; a religious presidency over the commonwealth;
the right of issuing ordinances with binding power; the reduction
of the senate to a council of state; the revival of the patriciate
and of the praefecture of the city.  But still more striking
than these analogies is the internal similarity of the monarchy
of Servius Tullius and the monarchy of Caesar; if those
old kings of Rome with all their plenitude of power had yet
been rulers of a free community and themselves the protectors
of the commons against the nobility, Caesar too had not come
to destroy liberty but to fulfil it, and primarily to break
the intolerable yoke of the aristocracy.  Nor need it surprise us
that Caesar, anything but a political antiquary, went back
five hundred years to find the model for his new state; for,
seeing that the highest office of the Roman commonwealth had remained
at all times a kingship restricted by a number of special laws,
the idea of the regal office itself had by no means become obsolete.
At very various periods and from very different sides--
in the decemviral power, in the Sullan regency, and in Caesar's
own dictatorship--there had been during the republic a practical
recurrence to it; indeed by a certain logical necessity,
whenever an exceptional power seemed requisite there emerged,
in contradistinction to the usual limited -imperium-,
the unlimited -imperium- which was simply nothing else
than the regal power.

Lastly, outward considerations also recommended this recurrence
to the former kingly position.  Mankind have infinite difficulty
in reaching new creations, and therefore cherish the once developed forms
as sacred heirlooms.  Accordingly Caesar very judiciously
connected himself with Servius Tullius, in the same way
as subsequently Charlemagne connected himself with Caesar,
and Napoleon attempted at least to connect himself with Charlemagne.
He did so, not in a circuitous way and secretly, but, as well as
his successors, in the most open manner possible; it was indeed
the very object of this connection to find a clear, national,
and popular form of expression for the new state.  From ancient times
there stood on the Capitol the statues of those seven kings,
whom the conventional history of Rome was wont to bring on the stage;
Caesar ordered his own to be erected beside them as the eighth.
He appeared publicly in the costume of the old kings of Alba.
In his new law as to political crimes the principal variation
from that of Sulla was, that there was placed alongside
of the collective community, and on a level with it, the Imperator
as the living and personal expression of the people.  In the formula
used for political oaths there was added to the Jovis and the Penates
of the Roman people the Genius of the Imperator.  The outward badge
of monarchy was, according to the view univerally diffused in antiquity,
the image of the monarch on the coins; from the year 710
the head of Caesar appears on those of the Roman state.

There could accordingly be no complaint at least on the score
that Caesar left the public in the dark as to his view of his position;
as distinctly and as formally as possible he came forward
not merely as monarch, but as very king of Rome.  It is possible even,
although not exactly probable, and at any rate of subordinate
importance, that he had it in view to designate his official power
not with the new name of Imperator, but directly with the old one
of King.(18)  Even in his lifetime many of his enemies as of his friends
were of opinion that he intended to have himself expressly nominated
king of Rome; several indeed of his most vehement adherents
suggested to him in different ways and at different times
that he should assume the crown; most strikingly of all,
Marcus Antonius, when he as consul offered the diadem to Caesar
before all the people (15 Feb. 710).  But Caesar rejected
these proposals without exception at once.  If he at the same time
took steps against those who made use of these incidents to stir
republican opposition, it by no means follows from this that he was not
in earnest with his rejection.  The assumption that these invitations
took place at his bidding, with the view of preparing the multitude
for the unwonted spectacle of the Roman diadem, utterly misapprehends
the mighty power of the sentimental opposition with which
Caesar had to reckon, and which could not be rendered more compliant,
but on the contrary necessarily gained a broader basis,
through such a public recognition of its warrant on the part
of Caesar himself.  It may have been the uncalled-for zeal of vehement
adherents alone that occasioned these incidents; it may be also,
that Caesar merely permitted or even suggested the scene with Antonius,
in order to put an end in as marked a manner as possible
to the inconvenient gossip by a declinature which took place
before the eyes of the burgesses and was inserted by his command
even in the calendar of the state and could not, in fact,
be well revoked.  The probability is that Caesar, who appreciated alike
the value of a convenient formal designation and the antipathies
of the multitude which fasten more on the names than on the essence
of things, was resolved to avoid the name of king as tainted
with an ancient curse and as more familiar to the Romans of his time
when applied to the despots of the east than to their own Numa
and Servius, and to appropriate the substance of the regal office
under the title of Imperator.

The New Court
The New Patrician Nobility

But, whatever may have been the definitive title present to his thoughts
the sovereign ruler was there, and accordingly the court
established itself at once with all its due accompaniments of pomp,
insipidity, and emptiness.  Caesar appeared in public not in the robe
of the consuls which was bordered with purple stripes,
but in the robe wholly of purple which was reckoned in antiquity
as the proper regal attire, and received, seated on his golden chair
and without rising from it, the solemn procession of the senate.
The festivals in his honour commemorative of birthday, of victories,
and of vows, filled the calendar.  When Caesar came to the capital,
his principal servants marched forth in troops to great distances
so as to meet and escort him.  To be near to him began to be
of such importance, that the rents rose in the quarter of the city
where he dwelt.  Personal interviews with him were rendered
so difficult by the multitude of individuals soliciting audience,
that Caesar found himself compelled in many cases to communicate
even with his intimate friends in writing, and that persons
even of the highest rank had to wait for hours in the antechamber.
People felt, more clearly than was agreeable to Caesar himself,
that they no longer approached a fellow-citizen.  There arose
a monarchical aristocracy, which was in a remarkable manner at once
new and old, and which had sprung out of the idea of casting
into the shade the aristocracy of the oligarchy by that of royalty,
the nobility by the patriciate.  The patrician body still subsisted,
although without essential privileges as an order, in the character
of a close aristocratic guild;(19) but as it could receive
no new -gentes-(20) it had dwindled away more and more in the course
of centuries, and in the time of Caesar there were not more than
fifteen or sixteen patrician -gentes- still in existence.
Caesar, himself sprung from one of them, got the right
of creating new patrician -gentes- conferred on the Imperator
by decree of the people, and so established, in contrast
to the republican nobility, the new aristocracy of the patriciate,
which most happily combined all the requisites of a monarchical
aristocracy--the charm of antiquity, entire dependence
on the government, and total insignificance.  On all sides
the new sovereignty revealed itself.

Under a monarch thus practically unlimited there could hardly
be scope for a constitution at all--still less for a continuance
of the hitherto existing commonwealth based on the legal co-operation
of the burgesses, the senate, and the several magistrates. Caesar fully
and definitely reverted to the tradition of the regal period;
the burgess-assembly remained--what it had already been, in that period--
by the side of and with the king the supreme and ultimate expression
of the will of the sovereign people; the senate was brought back
to its original destination of giving advice to the ruler
when he requested it; and lastly the ruler concentrated in his person
anew the whole magisterial authority, so that there existed no other
independent state-official by his side any more than by the side
of the kings of the earliest times.

Legislation
Edicts

For legislation the democratic monarch adhered to the primitive maxim
of Roman state-law, that the community of the people in concert
with the king convoking them had alone the power of organically
regulating the commonwealth; and he had his constitutive enactments
regularly sanctioned by decree of the people. The free energy
and the authority half-moral, half-political, which the yea or nay
of those old warrior-assemblies had carried with it, could not indeed
be again instilled into the so-called comitia of this period;
the co-operation of the burgesses in legislation, which in the old
constitution had been extremely limited but real and living,
was in the new practically an unsubstantial shadow.   There was therefore
no need of special restrictive measures against the comitia;
many years' experience had shown that every government--
the oligarchy as well as the monarch--easily kept on good terms
with this formal sovereign.  These Caesarian comitia were an important
element in the Caesarian system and indirectly of practical significance,
only in so far as they served to retain in principle the sovereignty
of the people and to constitute an energetic protest against sultanism.

But at the same time--as is not only obvious of itself, but is also
distinctly attested--the other maxim also of the oldest state-law
was revived by Caesar himself, and not merely for the first time
by his successors; viz.  that what the supreme, or rather sole,
magistrate commands is unconditionally valid so long as he remains
in office, and that, while legislation no doubt belongs only to the king
and the burgesses in concert, the royal edict is equivalent to law
at least till the demission of its author.

The Senate as the State-Council of the Monarch

While the democratic king thus conceded to the community of the people
at least a formal share in the sovereignty, it was by no means
his intention to divide his authority with what had hitherto been
the governing body, the college of senators.  The senate of Caesar
was to be--in a quite different way from the later senate of Augustus--
nothing but a supreme council of state, which he made use
of for advising with him beforehand as to laws, and for the issuing
of the more important administrative ordinances through it,
or at least under its name--for cases in fact occurred where decrees
of senate were issued, of which none of the senators recited
as present at their preparation had any cognizance.  There were
no material difficulties of form in reducing the senate to it
original deliberative position, which it had overstepped more de facto
than de jure; but in this case it was necessary to protect himself
from practical resistance, for the Roman senate was as much
the headquarters of the opposition to Caesar as the Attic Areopagus
was of the opposition to Pericles.  Chiefly for this reason
the number of senators, which had hitherto amounted at most
to six hundred in its normal condition(21) and had been greatly reduced
by the recent crises, was raised by extraordinary supplement
to nine hundred; and at the same time, to keep it at least
up to this mark, the number of quaestors to be nominated annually,
that is of members annually admitted to the senate, was raised
from twenty to forty.(22)  The extraordinary filling up of the senate
was undertaken by the monarch alone.  In the case of the ordinary
additions he secured to himself a permanent influence through
the circumstance, that the electoral colleges were bound by law(23)
to give their votes to the first twenty candidates for the quaestorship
who were provided with letters of recommendation from the monarch;
besides, the crown was at liberty to confer the honorary rights
attaching to the quaestorship or to any office superior to it,
and consequently a seat in the senate in particular, by way of exception
even on individuals not qualified.   The selection of the extraordinary
members who were added naturally fell in the main on adherents
of the new order of things, and introduced, along with -equites-
of respectable standing, various dubious and plebeian personages
into the proud corporation--former senators who had been erased
from the roll by the censor or in consequence of a judicial sentence,
foreigners from Spain and Gaul who had to some extent to learn
their Latin in the senate, men lately subaltern officers
who had not previously received even the equestrian ring,
sons of freedmen or of such as followed dishonourable trades,
and other elements of a like kind.  The exclusive circles
of the nobility, to whom this change in the personal composition
of the senate naturally gave the bitterest offence, saw in it
an intentional depreciation of the very institution itself.
Caesar was not capable of such a self-destructive policy;
he was as determined not to let himself be governed by his council
as he was convinced of the necessity of the institute in itself.
They might more correctly have discerned in this proceeding the intention
of the monarch to take away from the senate its former character
of an exclusive representation of the oligarchic aristocracy,
and to make it once more--what it had been in the regal period--
a state-council representing all classes of persons belonging
to the state through their most intelligent elements, and not necessarily
excluding the man of humble birth or even the foreigner;  just as those
earliest kings introduced non-burgesses,(24) Caesar introduced
non-Italians into his senate.

Personal Government by Caesar

While the rule of the nobility was thus set aside and its existence
undermined, and while the senate in its new form was merely a tool
of the monarch, autocracy was at the same time most strictly
carried out in the administration and government of the state,
and the whole executive was concentrated in the hands of the monarch.
First of all, the Imperator naturally decided in person every question
of any moment.  Caesar was able to carry personal government
to an extent which we puny men can hardly conceive, and which
is not to be explained solely from the unparalleled rapidity
and decision of his working, but has moreover its ground
in a more general cause.  When we see Caesar, Sulla, Gaius Gracchus,
and Roman statesmen in general displaying throughout an activity
which transcends our notions of human powers of working, the reason lies,
not in any change that human nature has undergone since that time,
but in the change which has taken place since then in the organization
of the household.  The Roman house was a machine, in which even
the mental powers of the slaves and freedmen yielded their produce
to the master; a master, who knew how to govern these, worked as it were
with countless minds.  It was the beau ideal of bureaucratic
centralization; which our counting-house system strives indeed
zealously to imitate, but remains as far behind its prototype
as the modern power of capital is inferior to the ancient system
of slavery. Caesar knew how to profit by this advantage;
wherever any post demanded special confidence, we see him filling it up
on principle--so far as other considerations at all permit--
with his slaves freedmen, or clients of humble birth.  His works
as a whole show what an organizing genius like his could accomplish
with such an  instrument; but to the question, how in detail
these marvellous feats were achieved, we have no adequate answer.
Bureaucracy resembles a manufactory also in this respect,
that the work done does not appear as that of the individual
who has worked at it, but as that of the manufactory which stamps it.
This much only is quite clear, that Caesar, in his work had no helper
at all who exerted a personal influence over it or was even so much as
initiated into the whole plan; he was not only the sole master,
but he worked also without skilled associates,
merely with common labourers.

In Matters of Finance

With respect to details as a matter of course in strictly political
affairs Caesar avoided, so far as was at all possible,
any delegation of his functions.  Where it was inevitable,
as especially when during his frequent absence from Rome he had need
of a higher organ there, the person destined for this purpose was,
significantly enough, not the legal deputy of the monarch,
the prefect of the city, but a confidant without officially-recognized
jurisdiction, usually Caesar's banker, the cunning and pliant
Phoenician merchant Lucius Cornelius Balbus from Gades.
In administration Caesar was above all careful to resume the keys
of the state-chest--which the senate had appropriated to itself
after the fall of the regal power, and by means of which
it had possessed itself of the government--and to entrust them
only to those servants who with their persons were absolutely
and exclusively devoted to him.  In respect of ownership indeed
the private means of the monarch remained, of course, strictly
separate from the property of the state; but Caesar took in hand
the administration of the whole financial and monetary system
of the state, and conducted it entirely in the way in which
he and the Roman grandees generally were wont to manage
the administration of their own means and substance.  For the future
the levying of the provincial revenues and in the main also
the management of the coinage were entrusted to the slaves and freedmen
of the Imperator and men of the senatorial order were excluded from it--
a momentous step out of which grew in course of time the important class
of procurators and the "imperial household."

In the Governorships

Of the governorships on the other hand, which, after they had handed
their financial business over to the new imperial tax-receivers,
were still more than they had formerly been essentially military commands,
that of Egypt alone was transferred to the monarch's own retainers.
The country of the Nile, in a peculiar manner geographically isolated
and politically centralized, was better fitted than any other district
to break off permanently under an able leader from the central power,
as the attempts which had repeatedly been made by hard-pressed Italian
party-chiefs to establish themselves there during the recent crisis
sufficiently proved.  Probably it was just this consideration
thatinduced Caesar not to declare the land formally a province,
but to leave the harmless Lagids there; and certainly for this reason
the legions stationed in Egypt were not entrusted to a man
belonging to the senate or, in other words, to the former government,
but this command was, just like the posts of tax-receivers,
treated as a menial office.(25)  In general however the consideration
had weight with Caesar, that the soldiers of Rome should not,
like those of Oriental kings, be commanded by lackeys.  It remained
the rule to entrust the more important governorships to those
who had been consuls, the less important to those who had been praetors;
and once more, instead of the five years' interval prescribed
by the law of 702,(26) the commencement of the governorship probably
was in the ancient fashion annexed directly to the close of the official
functions in the city.  On the other hand the distribution
of the provinces among the qualified candidates, which had hitherto
been arranged sometimes by decree of the people or senate,
sometimes by concert among the magistrates or by lot, passed over
to the monarch.  And, as the consuls were frequently induced
to abdicate before the end of the year and to make room for after-
elected consuls (-consules suffecti-); as, moreover, the number
of praetors annually nominated was raised from eight to sixteen,
and the nomination of half of them was entrusted to the Imperator
in the same way as that of the half of the quaestors; and, lastly,
as there was reserved to the Imperator the right of nominating,
if not titular consuls, at any rate titular praetors and titular
quaestors: Caesar secured a sufficient number of candidates
acceptable to him for filling up the governorships.  Their recall
remained of course left to the discretion of the regent as well as
their nomination; as a rule it was assumed that the consular governor
should not remain more than two years, nor the praetorian
more than one year, in the province.

In the Administration of the Capital

Lastly, so far as concerns the administration of the city which was
his capital and residence, the Imperator evidently intended for a time
to entrust this also to magistrates similarly nominated by him.
He revived the old city-lieutenancy of the regal period;(27)
on different occasions he committed during his absence the administration
of the capital to one or more such lieutenants nominated by him
without consulting the people and for an indefinite period,
who united in themselves the functions of all the administrative
magistrates and possessed even the right of coining money
with their own name, although of course not with their own effigy
In 707 and in the first nine months of 709 there were, moreover,
neither praetors nor curule aediles nor quaestors; the consuls too
were nominated in the former year only towards its close,
and in the latter Caesar was even consul without a colleague.
This looks altogether like an attempt to revive completely
the old regal authority within the city of Rome, as far as the limits
enjoined by the democratic past of the new monarch; in other words,
of magistrates additional to the king himself, to allow only
the prefect of the city during the king's absence and the tribunes
and plebeian aediles appointed for protecting popular freedom
to continue in existence, and to abolish the consulship, the censorship,
the praetorship, the curule aedileship and the quaestorship.(28)
But Caesar subsequently departed from this; he neither accepted
the royal title himself, nor did he cancel those venerable names
interwoven with the glorious history of the republic.  The consuls,
praetors, aediles, tribunes, and quaestors retained substantially
their previous formal powers; nevertheless their position
was totally altered.  It was the political idea lying
at the foundation of the republic that the Roman empire was identified
with the city of Rome, and in consistency with it the municipal
magistrates of the capital were treated throughout as magistrates
of the empire.  In the monarchy of Caesar that view and this consequence
of it fell into abeyance; the magistrates of Rome formed thenceforth
only the first among the many municipalities of the empire,
and the consulship in particular became a purely titular post,
which preserved a certain practical importance only in virtue
of the reversion of a higher governorship annexed to it.  The fate,
which the Roman community had been wont to prepare for the vanquished,
now by means of Caesar befell itself; its sovereignty over
the Roman empire was converted into a limited communal freedom
within the Roman state.  That at the same time the number
of the praetors and quaestors was doubled, has been already mentioned;
the same course was followed with the plebeian aediles, to whom
two new "corn-aediles" (-aediles Ceriales-) were added to superintend
the supplies of the capital.  The appointment to those offices remained
with the community, and was subject to no restriction as respected
the consuls and perhaps also the tribunes of the people
and plebeian aediles; we have already adverted to the fact,
that the Imperator reserved a right of proposal binding on the electors
as regards the half of the praetors, curule aediles, and quaestors
to be annually nominated.  In general the ancient and hallowed
palladia of popular freedom were not touched; which, of course,
did not prevent the individual refractory tribune of the people
from being seriously interfered with and, in fact, deposed and erased
from the roll of senators.

As the Imperator was thus, for the more general and more important
questions, his own minister; as he controlled the finances
by his servants, and the army by his adjutants; and as the old republican
state-magistracies were again converted into municipal magistracies
of the city of Rome; the autocracy was sufficiently established.

The State-Hierarchy

In the spiritual hierarchy on the other hand Caesar, although he issued
a detailed law respecting this portion of the state-economy,
made no material alteration, except that he connected with the person
of the regent the supreme pontificate and perhaps also the membership
of the higher priestly colleges generally; and, partly
in connection with this, one new stall was created in each
of the three supreme colleges, and three new stalls in the fourth college
of the banquet-masters.  If the Roman state-hierarchy had hitherto
served as a support to the ruling oligarchy, it might render
precisely the same service to the new monarchy.  The conservative
religious policy of the senate was transferred to the new kings of Rome;
when the strictly conservative Varro published about this time
his "Antiquities of Divine Things," the great fundamental
repository of Roman state-theology, he was allowed to dedicate it
to the -Pontifex Maximus- Caesar.  The faint lustre which the worship
of Jovis was still able to impart shone round the newly-established
throne; and the old national faith became in its last stages
the instrument of a Caesarian papacy, which, however,
was from the outset but hollow and feeble.

Regal Jurisdiction

In judicial matters, first of all, the old regal jurisdiction
was re-established.  As the king had originally been judge in criminal
and civil causes, without being legally bound in the former
to respect an appeal to the prerogative of mercy in the people,
or in the latter to commit the decision of the question in dispute
to jurymen; so Caesar claimed the right of bringing capital causes
as well as private processes for sole and final decision to his own bar,
and disposing of them in the event of his presence personally,
in the event of his absence by the city-lieutenant.  In fact,
we find him, quite after the manner of the ancient kings, now sitting
in judgment publicly in the Forum of the capital on Roman burgesses
accused of high treason, now holding a judicial inquiry, in his house
regarding the client princes accused of the like crime;
so that the only privilege, which the Roman burgesses had as compared
with the other subjects of the king, seems to have consisted
in the publicity of the judicial procedure.  But this resuscitated
supreme jurisdiction of the kings, although Caesar discharged its duties
with impartiality and care, could only from the nature of the case
find practical application in exceptional cases.

Retention of the Previous Administration of Justice

For the usual procedure in criminal and civil causes the former
republican mode of administering justice was substantially retained.
Criminal causes were still disposed of as formerly before the different
jury-commissions competent to deal with the several crimes,
civil causes partly before the court of inheritance or,
as it was commonly called, of the -centumviri-, partly before
the single -iudices-; the superintendence of judicial proceedings
was as formerly conducted in the capital chiefly by the praetors,
in the provinces by the governors.  Political crimes too continued
even under the monarchy to be referred to a jury-commission;
the new ordinance, which Caesar issued respecting them, specified
the acts legally punishable with precision and in a liberal spirit
which excluded all prosecution of opinions, and it fixed
as the penalty not death, but banishment.  As respects the selection
of the jurymen, whom the senatorial party desired to see chosen
exclusively from the senate and the strict Gracchans exclusively
from the equestrian order, Caesar, faithful to the principle
of reconciling the parties, left the matter on the footing
of the compromise-law of Cotta,(29) but with the modification--
for which the way was probably prepared by the law of Pompeius
of 699(30)-that the -tribuni aerarii- who came from the lower ranks
of the people were set aside; so that there was established a rating
for jurymen of at least 400,000 sesterces (4000 pounds), and senators
and equites now divided the functions of jurymen which had so long
been an apple of discord between them.

Appeal to the Monarch

The relations of the regal and the republican jurisdiction were
on the whole co-ordinate, so that any cause might be initiated as well
before the king's bar as before the competent republican tribunal,
the latter of course in the event of collision giving way;
if on the other hand the one or the other tribunal had pronounced
sentence, the cause was thereby finally disposed of.  To overturn
a verdict pronounced by the jurymen duly called to act in a civil
or in a criminal cause even the new ruler was not entitled,
except where special incidents, such as corruption or violence,
already according to the law of the republic gave occasion
for cancelling the jurymen's sentence.  On the other hand
the principle that, as concerned any decree emanating merely
from magistrates, the person aggrieved by it was entitled to appeal
to the superior of the decreeing authority, probably obtained
even now the great extension, out of which the subsequent imperial
appellate jurisdiction arose; perhaps all the magistrates
administering law, at least the governors of all the provinces,
were regarded so far as subordinates of the ruler, that appeal
to him might be lodged from any of their decrees.

Decay of the Judicial System

Certainly these innovations, the most important of which--
the general extension given to appeal--cannot even be reckoned
absolutely an improvement, by no means healed thoroughly the evils
from which the Roman administration of justice was suffering.
Criminal procedure cannot be sound in any slave-state, inasmuch as
the task of proceeding against slaves lies, if not de jure,
at least de facto in the hands of the master.  The Roman master,
as may readily be conceived, punished throughout the crime of his serf,
not as a crime, but only so far as it rendered the slave useless
or disagreeable to him; slave criminals were merely drafted off
somewhat like oxen addicted to goring, and, as the latter
were sold to the butcher, so were the former sold to the fencing-booth.
But even the criminal procedure against free men, which had been
from the outset and always in great part continued to be
a political process, had amidst the disorder of the last generations
become transformed from a grave legal proceeding into a faction-
fight to be fought out by means of favour, money, and violence.
The blame rested jointly on all that took part in it, on the magistrates,
the jury, the parties, even the public who were spectators;
but the most incurable wounds were inflicted on  justice by the doings
of the advocates.  In proportion as the parasitic plant
of Roman forensic eloquence flourished, all positive ideas of right
became broken up; and the distinction, so difficult of apprehension
by the public, between opinion and evidence was in reality
expelled from the Roman criminal practice.  "A plain simple defendant,"
says a Roman advocate of much experience at this period, "may be accused
of any crime at pleasure which he has or has not committed, and will be
certainly condemned."  Numerous pleadings in criminal causes
have been preserved to us from this epoch; there is hardly one of them
which makes even a serious attempt to fix the crime in question
and to put into proper shape the proof or counterproof.(31)
That the contemporary civil procedure was likewise in various respects
unsound, we need hardly mention; it too suffered from the effects
of the party politics mixed up with all things, as for instance
in the process of Publius Quinctius (671-673), where the most
contradictory decisions were given according as Cinna or Sulla
had the ascendency in Rome; and the advocates, frequently non-jurists,
produced here also intentionally and unintentionally abundance
of confusion.  But it was implied in the nature of the case,
that party mixed itself up with such matters only by way of exception,
and that here the quibbles of advocates could not so rapidly or so deeply
break up the ideas of right; accordingly the civil pleadings
which we possess from this epoch, while not according
to our stricter ideas effective compositions for their purpose,
are yet of a far less libellous and far more juristic character
than the contemporary speeches in criminal causes.  If Caesar permitted
the curb imposed on the eloquence of advocates by Pompeius(32)
to remain, or even rendered it more severe, there was at least
nothing lost by this; and much was gained, when better selected
and better superintended magistrates and jurymen were nominated
and the palpable corruption and intimidation of the courts
came to an end.  But the sacred sense of right and the reverence
for the law, which it is difficult to destroy in the minds
of the multitude, it is still more difficult to reproduce.
Though the legislator did away with various abuses, he could not heal
the root of the evil; and it might be doubted whether time,
which cures everything curable, would in this case bring relief.

Decay of the Roman Military System

The Roman military system of this period was nearly in the same condition
as the Carthaginian at the time of Hannibal. The governing classes
furnished only the officers; the subjects, plebeians and provincials,
formed the army.  The general was, financially and militarily,
almost independent of the central government, and, whether
in fortune or misfortune, substantially left to himself
and to the resources of his province.  Civic and even national spirit
had vanished from the army, and the esprit de corps was alone
left as a bond of inward union.  The army had ceased to be
an instrument of the commonwealth; in a political point of view
it had no will of its own, but it was doubtless able to adopt
that of the master who wielded it; in a military point of view
it sank under the ordinary miserable leaders into a disorganized
useless rabble, but under a right general it attained a military
perfection which the burgess-army could never reach.  The class
of officers especially had deeply degenerated. The higher ranks,
senators and equites, grew more and more unused to arms.
While formerly there had been a zealous competition for the posts
of staff officers, now every man of equestrian rank, who chose to serve,
was sure of a military tribuneship, and several of these posts
had even to be filled with men of humbler rank; and any man
of quality at all who still served sought at least to finish
his term of service in Sicily or some other province where
he was sure not to face the enemy.  Officers of ordinary bravery
and efficiency were stared at as prodigies; as to Pompeius especially,
his contemporaries practised a military idolatry which in every
respect compromised them.  The staff, as a rule, gave the signal
for desertion and for mutiny; in spite of the culpable indulgence
of the commanders proposals for the cashiering of officers of rank
were daily occurrences.  We still possess the picture--
drawn not without irony by Caesar's own hand--of the state of matters
at his own headquarters when orders were given to march
against Ariovistus, of the cursing and weeping, and preparing
of testaments, and presenting even of requests for furlough.
In the soldiery not a trace of the better classes could any longer
be discovered.  Legally the general obligation to bear arms
still subsisted; but the levy, if resorted to alongside of enlisting,
took place in the most irregular manner; numerous persons
liable to serve were wholly passed over, while those once levied
were retained thirty years and longer beneath the eagles.
The Roman burgess-cavalry now merely vegetated as a sort of mounted
noble guard, whose perfumed cavaliers and exquisite high-bred horses
only played a part in the festivals of the capital; the so-called
burgess-infantry was a troop of mercenaries swept together
from the lowest ranks of the burgess-population; the subjects furnished
the cavalry and the light troops exclusively, and came to be
more and more extensively employed also in the infantry.  The posts
of centurions in the legions, on which in the mode of warfare
of that time the efficiency of the divisions essentially depended,
and to which according to the national military constitution the soldier
served his way upward with the pike, were now not merely regularly
conferred according to favour, but were not unfrequently sold
to the highest bidder.  In consequence of the bad financial management
of the government and the venality and fraud of the great majority
of the magistrates, the payment of the soldiers was extremely
defective and irregular.

The necessary consequence of this was, that in the ordinary
course of things the Roman armies pillaged the provincials,
mutinied against their officers, and ran off in presence of the enemy;
instances occurred where considerable armies, such as the Macedonian army
of Piso in 697,(33) were without any proper defeat utterly ruined,
simply by this misconduct.  Capable leaders on the other hand,
such as Pompeius, Caesar, Gabinius, formed doubtless out of the existing
materials able and effective, and to some extent exemplary,
armies; but these armies belonged far more to their general
than to the commonwealth.  The still more complete decay
of the Roman marine--which, moreover, had remained an object
of antipathy to the Romans and had never been fully nationalized--
scarcely requires to be mentioned.  Here too, on all sides,
everything that could be ruined at all had been reduced to ruin
under the oligarchic government.

Its Reorganization by Caesar

The reorganization of the Roman military system by Caesar
was substantially limited to the tightening and strengthening
of the reins of discipline, which had been relaxed under the negligent
and incapable supervision previously subsisting.  The Roman military
system seemed to him neither to need, nor to be capable of,
radical reform; he accepted the elements of the army, just as Hannibal
had accepted them.  The enactment of his municipal ordinance that,
in order to the holding of a municipal magistracy or sitting
in the municipal council before the thirtieth year, three years' service
on horseback--that is, as officer--or six years' service on foot
should be required, proves indeed that he wished to attract
the better classes to the army; but it proves with equal clearness
that amidst the ever-increasing prevalence of an unwarlike spirit
in the nation he himself held it no longer possible to associate
the holding of an honorary office with the fulfilment of the time
of service unconditionally as hitherto.  This very circumstance
serves to explain why Caesar made no attempt to re-establish
the Roman burgess-cavalry.  The levy was better arranged,
the time of service was regulated and abridged; otherwise matters
remained on the footing that the infantry of the line were raised
chiefly from the lower orders of the Roman burgesses, the cavalry
and the light infantry from the subjects.  That nothing was done
for the reorganization of the fleet, is surprising.

Foreign Mercenaries
Adjutants of the Legion

It was an innovation--hazardous beyond doubt even in the view
of its author--to which the untrustworthy character of the cavalry
furnished by the subjects compelled him,(34) that Caesar
for the first time deviated from the old Roman system of never fighting
with mercenaries, and incorporated in the cavalry hired foreigners,
especially Germans.  Another innovation was the appointment of adjutants
of the legion (-legati legionis-).  Hitherto the military tribunes,
nominated partly by the burgesses, partly by the governor concerned,
had led the legions in such a way that six of them were placed
over each legion, and the command alternated among these;
a single commandant of the legion was appointed by the general
only as a temporary and extraordinary measure.  In subsequent times
on the other hand those colonels or adjutants of legions appear
as a permanent and organic institution, and as nominated no longer
by the governor whom they obey, but by the supreme command in Rome;
both changes seem referable to Caesar's arrangements connected
with the Gabinian law.(35)  The reason for the introduction
of this important intervening step in the military hierarchy
must be sought partly in the necessity for a more energetic
centralization of the command, partly in the felt want of capable
superior officers, partly and chiefly in the design of providing
a counterpoise to the governor by associating with him one or more
colonels nominated by the Imperator.

The New Commandership-in-Chief

The most essential change in the military system consisted
in the institution of a permanent military head in the person
of the Imperator, who, superseding the previous unmilitary
and in every respect incapable governing corporation, united
in his hands the whole control of the army, and thus converted it
from a direction which for the most part was merely nominal
into a real and energetic supreme command.  We are not properly informed
as to the position which this supreme command occupied towards
the special commands hitherto omnipotent in their respective spheres.
Probably the analogy of the relation subsisting between the praetor
and the consul or the consul and the dictator served generally
as a basis, so that, while the governor in his own right retained
the supreme military authority in his province, the Imperator
was entitled at any moment to take it away from him and assume it
for himself or his delegates, and, while the authority of the governor
was confined to the province, that of the Imperator, like the regal
and the earlier consular authority, extended over the whole empire.
Moreover it is extremely probable that now the nomination
of the officers, both the military tribunes and the centurions,
so far as it had hitherto belonged to the governor,(36) as well as
the nomination of the new adjutants of the legion, passed directly
into the hands of the Imperator; and in like manner even now
the arrangement of the levies, the bestowal of leave of absence,
and the more important criminal cases, may have been submitted
to the judgment of the commander-in-chief.  With this limitation
of the powers of the governors and with the regulated control
of the Imperator, there was no great room to apprehend
in future either that the armies might be utterly disorganized
or that they might be converted into retainers personally devoted
to their respective officers.

Caesar's Military Plans
Defence of the Frontier

But, however decidedly and urgently the circumstances pointed
to military monarchy, and however distinctly Caesar took the supreme
command exclusively for himself, he was nevertheless not at all
inclined to establish his authority by means of, and on, the army.
No doubt he deemed a standing army necessary for his state,
but only because from its geographical position it required
a comprehensive regulation of the frontiers and permanent frontier
garrisons.  Partly at earlier periods, partly during the recent
civil war, he had worked at the tranquillizing of Spain,
and had established strong positions for the defence of the frontier
in Africa along the great desert, and in the north-west of the empire
along the line of the Rhine.  He occupied himself with similar plans
for the regions on the Euphrates and on the Danube.  Above all
he designed an expedition against the Parthians, to avenge the day
of Carrhae; he had destined three years for this war, and was resolved
to settle accounts with these dangerous enemies once for all
and not less cautiously than thoroughly.  In like manner
he had projected the scheme of attacking Burebistas king of the Getae,
who was greatly extending his power on both sides of the Danube,(37)
and of protecting Italy in the north-east by border-districts
similar to those which he had created for it in Gaul.  On the other hand
there is no evidence at all that Caesar contemplated like Alexander
a career of victory extending indefinitely far; it is said indeed
that he had intended to march from Parthia to the Caspian
and from this to the Black Sea and then along its northern shores
to the Danube, to annex to the empire all Scythia and Germany as far as
the Northern Ocean--which according to the notions of that time was not
so very distant from the Mediterranean--and to return home through Gaul;
but no authority at all deserving of credit vouches for the existence
of these fabulous projects.  In the case of a state which, like the Roman
state of Caesar, already included a mass of barbaric elements difficult
to be controlled, and had still for centuries to come more than enough
to do with their assimilation, such conquests, even granting their
military practicability, would have been nothing but blunders
far more brilliant and far worse than the Indian expedition
of Alexander.  Judging both from Caesar's conduct in Britain
and Germany and from the conduct of those who became the heirs
of his political ideas, it is in a high degree probable that Caesar
with Scipio Aemilianus called on the gods not to increase the empire,
but to preserve it, and that his schemes of conquest restricted
themselves to a settlement of the frontier--measured, it is true,
by his own great scale--which should secure the line of the Euphrates,
and, instead of the fluctuating and militarily useless boundary
of the empire on the north-east, should establish and render defensible
the line of the Danube.

Attempts of Caesar to Avert Military Despotism

But, if it remains a mere probability that Caesar ought not
to be designated a world-conqueror in the same sense as Alexander
and Napoleon, it is quite certain that his design was not to rest
his new monarchy primarily on the support of the army nor generally
to place the military authority above the civil, but to incorporate
it with, and as far as possible subordinate it to, the civil
commonwealth.  The invaluable pillars of a military state,
those old and far-famed Gallic legions, were honourably dissolved
just on account of the incompatibility of their esprit de corps
with a civil commonwealth, and their glorious names were only perpetuated
in newly-founded urban communities.  The soldiers presented
by Caesar with allotments of land on their discharge were not,
like those of Sulla, settled together--as it were militarily--
in colonies of their own, but, especially when they settled in Italy,
were isolated as much as possible and scattered throughout the peninsula;
it was only in the case of the portions of the Campanian land
that remained for disposal, that an aggregation of the old soldiers
of Caesar could not be avoided.  Caesar sought to solve
the difficult task of keeping the soldiers of a standing army
within the spheres of civil life, partly by retaining the former
arrangement which prescribed merely certain years of service,
and not a service strictly constant, that is, uninterrupted
by any discharge; partly by the already-mentioned shortening of the term
of service, which occasioned a speedier change in the personal
composition of the army; partly by the regular settlement
of the soldiers who had served out their time as agricultural colonists;
partly and principally by keeping the army aloof from Italy
and generally from the proper seats of the civil and political life
of the nation, and directing the soldier to the points,
where according to the opinion of the great king he was alone,
in his place--to the frontier stations, that he might ward off
the extraneous foe.

Absence of Corps of Guards

The true criterion also of the military state--the development of,
and the privileged position assigned to, the corps of guards--
is not to be met with in the case of Caesar.  Although as respects
the army on active service the institution of a special bodyguard
for the general had been already long in existence,(38) in Caesar's
system this fell completely into the background; his praetorian
cohort seems to have essentially consisted merely of orderly
officers or non-military attendants, and never to have been
in the proper sense a select corps, consequently never an object
of jealousy to the troops of the line.  While Caesar even as general
practically dropped the bodyguard, he still, less as king tolerated
a guard round his person.  Although constantly beset by lurking
assassins and well aware of it, he yet rejected the proposal
of the senate to institute a select guard; dismissed,
as soon as things grew in some measure quiet, the Spanish escort
which he had made use of at first in the capital; and contented himself
with the retinue of lictors sanctioned by traditional usage
for the Roman supreme magistrates.

Impracticableness of Ideal

However much of the idea of his party and of his youth--
to found a Periclean government in Rome not by virtue of the sword,
but by virtue of the confidence of the nation--Caesar had been obliged
to abandon in the struggle with realities, he retained even now
the fundamental idea--of not founding a military monarchy--
with an energy to which history scarcely supplies a parallel.
Certainly this too was an impracticable ideal--it was the sole illusion,
in regard to which the earnest longing of that vigorous mind
was more powerful than its clear judgment.  A government, such as Caesar
had in view, was not merely of necessity in its nature highly personal,
and so liable to perish with the death of its author just as
 the kindred creations of Pericles and Cromwell with the death
of their founders; but, amidst the deeply disorganized state
of the nation, it was not at all credible that the eighth king of Rome
would succeed even for his lifetime in ruling, as his seven predecessors
had ruled, his fellow-burgesses merely by virtue of law and justice,
and as little probable that he would succeed in incorporating
the standing army--after it had during the last civil war
learned its power and unlearned its reverence--once more
as a subservient element in civil society.  To any one who calmly
considered to what extent reverence for the law had disappeared
from the lowest as from the highest ranks of society, the former hope
must have seemed almost a dream; and, if with the Marian reform
of the military system the soldier generally had ceased
to be a citizen,(39) the Campanian mutiny and the battle-field
of Thapsus showed with painful clearness the nature of the support
which the army now lent to the law.  Even the great democrat
could only with difficulty and imperfectly hold in check the powers
which he had unchained; thousands of swords still at his signal
flew from the scabbard, but they were no longer equally ready
upon that signal to return to the sheath.  Fate is mightier than genius.
Caesar desired to become the restorer of the civil commonwealth,
and became the founder of the military monarchy which he abhorred;
he overthrew the regime of aristocrats and bankers in the state,
only to put a military regime in their place, and the commonwealth
continued as before to be tyrannized and worked for profit
by a privileged minority.  And yet it is a privilege of the highest
natures thus creatively to err.  The brilliant attempts of great men
to realize the ideal, though they do not reach their aim,
form the best treasure of the nations.  It was owing to the work
of Caesar that the Roman military state did not become a police-state
till after the lapse of several centuries, and that the Roman Imperators,
however little they otherwise resembled the great founder
of their sovereignty, yet employed the soldier in the main
not against the citizen but against the public foe, and esteemed
both nation and army too highly to set the latter as constable
over the former.

Financial Administration

The regulation of financial matters occasioned comparatively
little difficulty in consequence of the solid foundations
which the immense magnitude of the empire and the exclusion
of the system of credit supplied.  If the state had hitherto found itself
in constant financial embarrassment, the fault was far from chargeable
on the inadequacy of the state revenues; on the contrary these had
of late years immensely increased.  To the earlier aggregate income,
which is estimated at 200,000,000 sesterces (2,000,000 pounds),
there were added 85,000,000 sesterces (850,000 pounds)
by the erection of the provinces of Bithynia-Pontus and Syria;
which increase, along with the other newly opened up or augmented
sources of income, especially from the constantly increasing produce
of the taxes on luxuries, far outweighed the loss of the Campanian rents.
Besides, immense sums had been brought from extraordinary sources
into the exchequer through Lucullus, Metellus, Pompeius, Cato,
and others.  The cause of the financial embarrassments rather la
partly in the increase of the ordinary and extraordinary expenditure,
partly in the disorder of management.  Under the former head,
the distribution of corn to the multitude of the capital claimed
almost exorbitant sums; through the extension  given to it
by Cato in 691(40) the yearly expenditure for that purpose amounted
to 30,000,000 sesterces (300,000 pounds) and after the abolition
in 696 of the compensation hitherto paid, it swallowed up even
a fifth of the state revenues.  The military budget also had risen,
since the garrisons of Cilicia, Syria, and Gaul had been added
to those of Spain, Macedonia, and the other provinces.
Among the extraordinary items of expenditure must be named
in the first place the great cost of fitting out fleets, on which,
for example, five years after the great razzia of 687, 34,000,000
sesterces (340,000 pounds) were expended at once.  Add to this
the very considerable sums which were consumed in wars and warlike
preparations; such as 18,000,000 sesterces (180,000 pounds)
paid at once to Piso merely for the outfit of the Macedonian army,
24,000,000 sesterces (240,000 pounds) even annually to Pompeius
for the maintenance and pay of the Spanish army, and similar sums
to Caesar for the Gallic legions.  But considerable as were
these demands made on the Roman exchequer, it would still have
beenable probably to meet them, had not its administration once
so exemplary been affected by the universal laxity and dishonesty
of this age; the payments of the treasury were often suspended
merely because of the neglect to call up its outstanding claims.
The magistrates placed over it, two of the quaestors--young men
annually changed--contented themselves at the best with inaction;
among the official staff of clerks and others, formerly so justly held
in high esteem for its integrity, the worst abuses now prevailed,
more especially since such posts had come to be bought and sold.

Financial Reforms of Caesar
Leasing of the Direct Taxes Abolished

As soon however as the threads of Roman state-finance were concentrated
no longer as hitherto in the senate, but in the cabinet of Caesar,
new life, stricter order, and more  compact connection at once pervaded
all the wheels and springs of that great machine.  the two institutions,
which originated with Gaius Gracchus and ate like a gangrene
into the Roman financial system--the leasing of the direct taxes,
and the distributions of grain--were partly abolished,
partly remodelled.  Caesar wished not, like his predecessor,
to hold the nobility in check by the banker-aristocracy
and the populace of the capital, but to set them aside and to deliver
the commonwealth from all parasites whether of high or lower rank;
and therefore he went in these two important questions
not with Gaius Gracchus, but with the oligarch Sulla.  The leasing system
was allowed to continue for the indirect taxes, in the case of which
it was very old and--under the maxim of Roman financial administration,
which was retained inviolable also by Caesar, that the levying
of the taxes should at any cost be kept simple and readily manageable--
absolutely could not be dispensed with.  But the direct taxes
were thenceforth universally either treated, like the African
and Sardinian deliveries of corn and oil, as contributions
in kind to be directly supplied to the state, or converted,
like the revenues of Asia Minor, into fixed money payments,
in which case the collection of the several sums payable
was entrusted to the tax-districts themselves.

Reform of the Distribution of Corn

The corn-distributions in the capital had hitherto been looked on
as a profitable prerogative of the community which ruled and,
because it ruled, had to be fed by its subjects.  This infamous
principle was set aside by Caesar; but it could not be overlooked
that a multitude of wholly destitute burgesses had been protected
solely by these largesses of food from starvation.  In this aspect
Caesar retained them.  While according to the Sempronian ordinance
renewed by Cato every Roman burgess settled in Rome had legally
a claim to bread-corn without payment, this list of recipients,
which had at last risen to the number of 320,000, was reduced
by the exclusion of all individuals having means or otherwise
provided for to 150,000, and this number was fixed once for all
as the maximum number of recipients of free corn; at the same time
an annual revision of the list was ordered, so that the places vacated
by removal or death might be again filled up with the most needful
among the applicants.  By this conversion of the political privilege
into a provision for the poor, a principle remarkable in a moral
as well as in a historical point of view came for the first time
into living operation.  Civil society but slowly and gradually
works its way to a perception of the interdependence of interests;
in earlier antiquity the state doubtless protected its members
from the public enemy and the murderer, but it was not bound to protect
the totally helpless fellow-citizen from the worse enemy, want,
by affording the needful means of subsistence.  It was the Attic
civilization which first developed, in the Solonian and post-Solonian
legislation, the principle that it is the duty of the community
to provide for its invalids and indeed for its poor generally
and it was Caesar that first developed what in the restricted compass
of Attic life had remained a municipal matter into an organic
institution of state, and transformed an arrangement,
which was a burden and a disgrace  for the commonwealth,
into the first of those institutions--in modern times as countless
as they are beneficial--where the infinite depth of human compassion
contends with the infinite depth of human misery.

The Budget of Income

In addition to these fundamental reforms a thorough revision
of the income and expenditure took place.  The ordinary sources
of income were everywhere regulated and fixed.  Exemption from taxation
was conferred on not a few communities and even on whole districts,
whether indirectly by the bestowal of the Roman or Latin franchise,
or directly by special privilege; it was obtained e. g. by all
the Sicilian communities(41) in the former, by the town of Ilion
in the latter way.  Still greater was the number of those whose
proportion of tribute was lowered; the communities in Further Spain,
for instance, already after Caesar's governorship had on his suggestion
a reduction of tribute granted to them by the senate, and now
the most oppressed province of Asia had not only the levying of its
direct taxes facilitated, but also a third of them wholly remitted.
The newly-added taxes, such as those of the communities subdued
in Illyria and above all of the Gallic communities--which latter
together paid annually 40,000,000 sesterces (400,000 pounds)--
were fixed throughout on a low scale.  It is true on the other hand
that various towns such as Little Leptis in Africa, Sulci in Sardinia,
and several Spanish communities, had their tribute raised by way
of penalty for their conduct during the last war.  The very lucrative
Italian harbour-tolls abolished in the recent times of anarchy
were re-established all the more readily, that this tax fell
essentially on luxuries imported from the east.  To these new
or revived sources of ordinary income were added the sums
which accrued by extraordinary means, especially in consequence
of the civil war, to the victor--the booty collected in Gaul;
the stock of cash in the capital; the treasures taken from the Italian
and Spanish temples; the sums raised in the shape of forced loan,
compulsory present, or fine, from the dependent communities
and dynasts, and the pecuniary penalties imposed in a similar way
by judicial sentence, or simply by sending an order to pay,
on individual wealthy Romans; and above all things the proceeds
from the estate of defeated opponents.  How productive these sources
of income were, we may learn from the fact, that the fine
of the African capitalists who sat in the opposition-senate alone
amounted to 100,000,000 sesterces (1,000,000 pounds) and the price paid
by the purchasers of the property of Pompeius to 70,000,000 sesterces
(700,000 pounds).  This course was necessary, because the power
of the beaten nobility rested in great measure on their colossal wealth
and could only be effectually broken by imposing on them the defrayment
of the costs of the war.  But the odium of the confiscations
was in some measure mitigated by the fact that  Caesar directed
their proceeds solely to the benefit of the state,
and, instead of overlooking after the manner of Sulla any act of fraud
in his favourites, exacted the purchase-money with rigour
even from his most faithful adherents, e. g. from Marcus Antonius.

The Budget of Expenditure

In the expenditure a diminution was in the first place obtained
by the considerable restriction of the largesses of grain.
The distribution of corn to the poor of the capital which was retained,
as well as the kindred supply of oil newly introduced by Caesar
for the Roman baths, were at least in great part charged once for all
on the contributions in kind from Sardinia and especially from Africa,
and were thereby wholly or for the most part kept separate
from the exchequer.  On the other hand the regular expenditure
for the military system was increased partly by the augmentation
of the standing army, partly by the raising of the pay of the legionary
from 480 sesterces (5 pounds) to 900 (9 pounds) annually.
Both steps were in fact indispensable.  There was a total want
of any real defence for the frontiers, and an indispensable preliminary
to it was a considerable increase of the army.  The doubling
of the pay was doubtless employed by Caesar to attach his soldiers
firmly to him,(42) but was not introduced as a permanent innovation
on that account.  The former pay of 1 1/3 sesterces (3 1/4 pence)
per day had been fixed in very ancient times, when money had
an altogether different value from that which it had in the Rome
of Caesar's day; it could only have been retained down to a period
when the common day-labourer in the capital earned by the labour
of his hands daily on an average 3 sesterces (7 1/2 pence),
because in those times the soldier entered the army not for the sake
of the pay, but chiefly for the sake of the--in great measure illicit--
perquisites of military service.  The first condition in order
to a serious reform in the military system, and to the getting rid
of those irregular gains of the soldier which formed a burden
mostly on the provincials, was an increase suitable to the times
in the regular pay; and the fixing of it at 2 1/2 sesterces (6 1/2 pence)
may be regarded as an equitable step, while the great burden
thereby imposed on the treasury was a necessary, and in its consequences
a beneficial, course.

Of the amount of the extraordinary expenses which Caesar
had to undertake or voluntarily undertook, it is difficult
to form a conception.  The wars themselves consumed enormous sums;
and sums perhaps not less were required to fulfil the promises
which Caesar had been obliged to make during the civil war.
It was a bad example and one unhappily not lost sight of in the sequel,
that every common soldier received for his participation in the civil war
20,000 sesterces (200 pounds), every burgess of the multitude
in the capital for his non-participation in it 300 sesterces
(3 pounds) as an addition to his aliment; but Caesar, after having once
under the pressure of circumstances pledged his word, was too much
of a king to abate from it.  Besides, Caesar answered innumerable
demands of honourable liberality, and put into circulation
immense sums for building more especially, which had been
shamefully neglected during the financial distress of the last times
of the republic--the cost of his buildings executed partly during
the Gallic campaigns, partly afterwards, in the capital was reckoned
at 160,000,000 sesterces (1,600,000 pounds).  The general result
of the financial administration of Caesar is expressed in the fact that,
while by sagacious and energetic reforms and by a right combination
of economy and liberality he amply and fully met all equitable claims,
nevertheless already in March 710 there lay in the public treasury
700,000,000 and in his own 100,000,000 sesterces (together
8,000,000 pounds)--a sum which exceeded by tenfold the amount of cash
in the treasury in the most flourishing times of the republic.(43)

Social Condition of the Nation

But the task of breaking up the old parties and furnishing
the new commonwealth with an appropriate constitution,
an efficient army, and well-ordered finances, difficult as it was,
was not the most difficult part of Caesar's work.  If the Italian nation
was really to be regenerated, it required a reorganization
which should transform all parts of the great empire--Rome, Italy,
and the provinces.  Let us endeavour here also to delineate
the old state of things, as well as the beginnings of a new
and more tolerable time.

The Capital

The good stock of the Latin nation had long since wholly disappeared
from Rome.  It is implied in the very nature of the case,
that a capital loses its municipal and even its national stamp
more quickly than any subordinate community.  There the upper classes
speedily withdraw from urban public life, in order to find
their home rather in the state as a whole than in a single city;
there are inevitably concentrated the foreign settlers, the fluctuating
population of travellers for pleasure or business, the mass
of the indolent, lazy, criminal, financially and morally bankrupt,
and for that very reason cosmopolitan, rabble.  All this preeminently
applied to Rome.  The opulent Roman frequently regarded his town-house
merely as a lodging.  When the urban municipal offices were converted
into imperial magistracies; when the civic assembly became the assembly
of burgesses of the empire; and when smaller self-governing tribal
or other associations were not tolerated within the capital:
all proper communal life ceased for Rome.  From the whole compass
of the widespread empire people flocked to Rome, for speculation,
for debauchery, for intrigue, for training in crime,
or even for the purpose of hiding there from the eye of the law.

The Populace There

These evils arose in some measure necessarily from the very nature
of a capital; others more accidental and perhaps still more grave
were associated with them.  There has never perhaps existed a great city
so thoroughly destitute of the means of support as Rome; importation
on the one hand, and domestic manufacture by slaves on the other,
rendered any free industry from the outset impossible there.
The injurious consequences of the radical evil pervading the politics
of antiquity in general--the slave-system--were more conspicuous
in the capital than anywhere else.  Nowhere were such masses
of slaves accumulated as in the city palaces of the great families
or of wealthy upstarts.  Nowhere were the nations of the three
continents mingled as in the slave-population of the capital--
Syrians, Phrygians and other half-Hellenes with Libyans and Moors,
Getae, and Iberians with the daily-increasing influx of Celts
and Germans.  The demoralization inseparable from the absence
of freedom, and the terrible inconsistency between formal
and moral right, were far more glaringly apparent in the case
of the half or wholly cultivated--as it were genteel--city-slave than,
in that of the rural serf who tilled the field in chains
like the fettered ox.  Still worse than the masses of slaves were those
who had been de jure or simply de facto released from slavery--
a mixture of mendicant rabble and very rich parvenus, no longer slaves
and not yet fully burgesses, economically and even legally dependent
on their master and yet with the pretensions of free men;
and these freedmen made their way above all towards the capital,
where gain of various sorts was to be had and the retail traffic
as well as the minor handicrafts were almost wholly in their hands.
Their influence on the elections is expressly attested;
and that they took a leading part in the street riots, is very evident
from the ordinary signal by means of which these were virtually
proclaimed by the demagogues--the closing of the shops
and places of sale.

Relations of the Oligarchy to the Populace

Moreover, the government not only did nothing to counteract
this corruption of the population of the capital, but even encouraged it
for the benefit of their selfish policy.  The judicious rule of law,
which prohibited individuals condemned for a capital offence
from dwelling in the capita, was not carried into effect
by the negligent police.  The police-supervision--so urgently required--
of association on the part of the rabble was at first neglected,
and afterwards(44) even declared punishable as a restriction inconsistent
with the freedom of the people.  The popular festivals had been allowed
so to increase that the seven ordinary ones alone--the Roman,
the Plebeian, those of the Mother of the Gods, of Ceres, of Apollo,
of Flora(45) and of Victoria--lasted altogether sixty-two days;
and to these were added the gladiatorial games and numerous other
extraordinary amusements.  The duty of providing grain at low prices--
which was unavoidably necessary with such a proletariate living wholly
from hand to mouth--was treated with the most unscrupulous frivolity,
and the fluctuations in the price of bread-corn were of a fabulous
and incalculable description.(46)  Lastly, the distribution of grain
formed an official invitation to the whole burgess-proletariate
who were destitute of food and indisposed for work to take up
their abode in the capital.

Anarchy of the Capital

The seed sown was bad, and the harvest corresponded.  The system
of clubs and bands in the sphere of politics, the worship of Isis
and similar pious extravagances in that of religion, had their root
in this state of things.  People were constantly in prospect
of a dearth, and not unfrequently in utter famine.  Nowhere was a man
less secure of his life than in the capital; murder professionally
prosecuted by banditti was the single trade peculiar to it;
the alluring of the victim to Rome was the preliminary
to his assassination; no one ventured into the country
in the vicinity of the capital without an armed retinue.
Its outward condition corresponded to this inward disorganization,
and seemed a keen satire on the aristocratic government.
Nothing was done for the regulation of the stream of the Tiber;
excepting that they caused the only bridge, with which they still
made shift,(47) to be constructed of stone at least as far as
the Tiber-island.  As little was anything done toward the levelling
of the city of the Seven Hills, except where perhaps the accumulation
of rubbish had effected some improvement.  The streets ascended
and descended narrow and angular, and were wretchedly kept; the footpaths
were small and ill paved.  The ordinary houses were built of bricks
negligently and to a giddy height, mostly by speculative builders
on account of the small proprietors; by which means the former
became vastly rich, and the latter were reduced to beggary.
Like isolated islands amidst this sea of wretched buildings
were seen the splendid palaces of the rich, which curtailed the space
for the smaller houses just as their owners curtailed the burgess-
rights of smaller men in the state, and beside whose marble pillars
and Greek statues the decaying temples, with their images of the gods
still in great part carved of wood, made a melancholy figure.
A police-supervision of streets, of river-banks, of fires, or of building
was almost unheard of; if the government troubled itself at all
about the inundations, conflagrations, and falls of houses
which were of yearly occurrence, it was only to ask from the state-
theologians their report and advice regarding the true import
of such signs and wonders.  If we try to conceive to ourselves
a London with the slave-population of New Orleans, with the police
of Constantinople, with the non-industrial character of the modern Rome,
and agitated by politics after the fashion of the Paris in 1848,
we shall acquire an approximate idea of the republican glory,
the departure of which Cicero and his associates in their
sulky letters deplore.

Caesar's Treatment of Matters in the Capital

Caesar did not deplore, but he sought to help so far as help
was possible.  Rome remained, of course, what it was--
a cosmopolitan city.  Not only would the attempt to give to it
once more a specifically Italian character have been impracticable;
it would not have suited Caesar's plan.  Just as Alexander found
for his Graeco-Oriental empire an appropriate capital in the Hellenic,
Jewish, Egyptian, and above all cosmopolitan, Alexandria,
so the capital of the new Romano-Hellenic universal empire,
situated at the meeting-point of the east and the west, was to be
not an Italian community, but the denationalized capital
of many nations.  For this reason Caesar tolerated the worship
of the newly-settled Egyptian gods alongside of Father Jovis, and granted
even to the Jews the free exercise of their strangely foreign ritual
in the very capital of the empire.  However offensive was the motley
mixture of the parasitic--especially the Helleno-Oriental--
population in Rome, he nowhere opposed its extension; it is significant,
that at his popular festivals for the capital he caused dramas
to be performed not merely in Latin and Greek, but also in other
languages, presumably in Phoenician, Hebrew, Syrian, Spanish.

Diminution of the Proletariate

But, if Caesar accepted with the full consciousness of what he was doing
the fundamental character of the capital such as he found it,
he yet worked energetically at the improvement of the lamentable
and disgraceful state of things prevailing there.  Unhappily
the primary evils were the least capable of being eradicated.
Caesar could not abolish slavery with its train of national calamities;
it must remain an open question, whether he would in the course of time
have attempted at least to limit the slave-population in the capital,
as he undertook to do so in another field.  As little could Caesar
conjure into existence a free industry in the capital;
yet the great building-operations remedied in some measure
the want of means of support there, and opened up to the proletariate
a source of small but honourable gain.  On the other hand Caesar
laboured energetically to diminish the mass of the free proletariate.
The constant influx of persons brought by the corn-largesses
to Rome was, if not wholly stopped,(48) at least very materially
restricted by the conversion of these largesses into a provision
for the poor limited to a fixed number.  The ranks of the existing
proletariate were thinned on the one hand by the  tribunals
which were instructed to proceed with unrelenting rigour
against the rabble, on the other hand by a comprehensive transmarine
colonization; of the 80,000 colonists whom Caesar sent beyond the seas
in the few years of his government, a very great portion
must have been taken from the lower ranks of the population
of the capital; most of the Corinthian settlers indeed were freedmen.
When in deviation from the previous order of things, which precluded
the freedmen from any urban honorary office, Caesar opened to them
in his colonies the doors of the senate-house, this was doubtless done
in order to gain those of them who were in better positions to favour
the cause of emigration.  This emigration, however, must have been
more than a mere temporary arrangement; Caesar, convinced like every
other man of sense that the only true remedy for the misery
of the proletariate consisted in a well-regulated system of colonization,
and placed by the condition of the empire in a position to realize it
to an almost unlimited extent, must have had the design
of permanently continuing the process, and so opening up a constant means
of abating an evil which was constantly reproducing itself.
Measures were further taken to set bounds to the serious fluctuations
in the price of the most important means of subsistence in the markets
of the capital.  The newly-organized and liberally-administered
finances of the state furnished the means for this purpose,
and two newly-nominated magistrates, the corn-aediles(49) were charged
with the special supervision of the contractors and of the market
of the capital.

The Club System Restricted

The club system was checked, more effectually than was possible
through prohibitive laws, by the change of the constitution;
inasmuch as with the republic and the republican elections and tribunals
the corruption and violence of the electioneering and judicial
-collegia---and generally the political Saturnalia of the -canaille---
came to an end of themselves.  Moreover the combinations called
into existence by the Clodian law were broken up, and the whole system
of association was placed under the superintendence of the governing
authorities.  With the exception of the ancient guilds and associations,
of the religious unions of the Jews, and of other specially excepted
categories, for which a simple intimation to the senate seems
to have sufficed, the permission to constitute a permanent society
with fixed times of assembling and standing deposits was made dependent
on a concession to be granted by the senate, and, as a rule,
doubtless only after the consent of the monarch had been obtained.

Street Police

To this was added a stricter administration of criminal justice
and an energetic police.  The laws, especially as regards the crime
of violence, were rendered more stringent; and the irrational enactment
of the republican law, that the convicted criminal was entitled
to withdraw himself from a part of the penalty which he had incurred
by self-banishment, was with reason set aside.  The detailed regulations,
which Caesar issued regarding the police of the capital,
are in great part still preserved; and all who choose may convince
themselves that the Imperator did not disdain to insist
on the house-proprietors putting the streets into repair
and paving the footpath in its whole breadth with hewn stones,
and to issue appropriate enactments regarding the carrying of litters
and the driving of waggons, which from the nature of the streets
were only allowed to move freely through the capital in the evening
and by night.  The supervision of the local police remained as hitherto
chiefly with the four aediles, who were instructed now at least,
if  not earlier, each to superintend a distinctly marked-off
police district within the capital.

Buildings of the Capital

Lastly, building in the capital, and the provision
connected therewith of institutions for the public benefit,
received from Caesar--who combined in himself the love for building
of a Roman and of an organizer--a sudden stimulus, which not merely
put to shame the mismanagement of the recent anarchic times,
but also left all that the Roman aristocracy had done in their best days
as far behind as the genius of Caesar surpassed the honest endeavours
of the Marcii and Aemilii.  It was not merely by the extent
of the buildings in themselves and the magnitude of the sums
expended on them that Caesar excelled his predecessors;
but a genuine statesmanly perception of what was for the public good
distinguishes what Caesar did for the public institutions of Rome
from all similar services.  He did not build, like his successors,
temples and other splendid structures, but he relieved the marketplace
of Rome--in which the burgess-assemblies, the seats of the chief courts,
the exchange, and the daily business-traffic as well as
the daily idleness, still were crowded together--at least
from the assemblies and the courts by constructing for the former
a new -comitium-, the Saepta Julia in the Campus Martius,
and for the latter a separate place of judicature, the Forum Julium
between the Capitol and Palatine.  Of a kindred spirit is the arrangement
originating with him, by which there were supplied to the baths
of the capital annually three million pounds of oil, mostly from Africa,
and they were thereby enabled to furnish to the bathers gratuitously
the oil required for the anointing of the body--a measure
of cleanliness and sanitary policy which, according
to the ancient dietetics based substantially on bathing and anointing,
was highly judicious.

But these noble arrangements were only the first steps towards
a complete remodelling of Rome.  Projects were already formed
for a new senate-house, for a new magnificent bazaar, for a theatre
to rival that of Pompeius, for a public Latin and Greek library
after the model of that recently destroyed at Alexandria--
the first institution of the sort in Rome--lastly for a temple of Mars,
which was to surpass all that had hitherto existed in riches and glory.
Still more brilliant was the idea, first, of constructing a canal
through the Pomptine marshes and drawing off their waters
to Tarracina, and secondly, of altering the lower course of the Tiber
and of leading it from the present Ponte Molle, not through
between the Campus Vaticanus and the Campus Martius, but rather
round the Campus Vaticanus and the Janiculum to Ostia,
where the miserable roadstead was to give place to an adequate
artificial harbour.  By this gigantic plan on the one hand
the most dangerous enemy of the capital, the malaria of the neighbourhood
would be banished; on the other hand the extremely limited facilities
for building in the capital would be at once enlarged by substituting
the Campus Vaticanus thereby transferred to the left bank of the Tiber
for the Campus Martius, and allowing the latter spacious field
to be applied for public and private edifices; while the capital
would at the same time obtain a safe seaport, the want of which
was so painfully felt.  It seemed as if the Imperator would remove
mountains and rivers, and venture to contend with nature herself.

Much however as the city of Rome gained by the new order of things
in commodiousness and magnificence, its political supremacy was,
as we have already said, lost to it irrecoverably through
that very change.  The idea that the Roman state should coincide
with the city of Rome had indeed in the course of time become
more and more unnatural and preposterous; but the maxim had been
so intimately blended with the essence of the Roman republic,
that it could not perish before the republic itself.  It was only
in the new state of Caesar that it was, with the exception perhaps
of some legal fictions, completely set aside, and the community
of the capital was placed legally on a level with all other
municipalities; indeed Caesar--here as everywhere endeavouring not merely
to regulate the thing, but also to call it officially by the right name--
issued his Italian municipal ordinance, beyond doubt purposely,
at once for the capital and for the other urban communities.  We may add
that Rome, just because it was incapable of a living communal character
as a capital, was even essentially inferior to the other municipalities
of the imperial period.  The republican Rome was a den of robbers,
but it was at the same time the state; the Rome of the monarchy,
although it began to embellish itself with all the glories
of the three continents and to glitter in gold and marble,
was yet nothing in the state but a royal residence in connection
with a poor-house, or in other words a necessary evil.

Italy
Italian Agriculture

While in the capital the only object aimed at was to get rid
of palpable evils by police ordinances on the greatest scale,
it was a far more difficult task to remedy the deep disorganization
of Italian economics.  Its radical misfortunes were those which
we previously noticed in detail--the disappearance of the agricultural,
and the unnatural increase of the mercantile, population--
with which an endless train of other evils was associated.
The reader will not fail to remember what was the state
of Italian agriculture.  In spite of the most earnest attempts
to check the annihilation of the small holdings, farm-husbandry
was scarcely any longer the predominant species of economy
during this epoch in any region of Italy proper, with the exception
perhaps of the valleys of the Apennines and Abruzzi.  As to
the management of estates, no material difference is perceptible
between the Catonian system formerly set forth(50) and that
described to us by Varro, except that the latter shows the traces
for better and for worse of the progress of city-life on a great scale
in Rome.  "Formerly," says Varro, "the barn on the estate was larger
than the manor-house; now it is wont to be the reverse." In the domains
of Tusculum and Tibur, on the shores of Tarracina and Baiae--
where the old Latin and Italian farmers had sown and reaped--
there now rose in barren splendour the villas of the Roman nobles,
some of which covered the space of a moderate-sized town with their
appurtenances of garden-grounds and aqueducts, fresh and salt water ponds
for the preservation and breeding of river and marine fishes,
nurseries of snails and slugs, game-preserves for keeping hares,
rabbits, stags, roes, and wild boars, and aviaries in which even cranes
and peacocks were kept.  But the luxury of a great city enriches also
many an industrious hand, and supports more poor than philanthropy
with its expenditure of alms.  Those aviaries and fish-ponds
of the grandees were of course, as a rule, a very costly indulgence.
But this system was carried to such an extent and prosecuted
with so much keenness, that e. g. the stock of a pigeon-house
was valued at 100,000 sesterces (1000 pounds); a methodical system
of fattening had sprung up, and the manure got from the aviaries
became of importance in agriculture; a single bird-dealer
was able to furnish at once 5000 fieldfares--for they knew how
to rear these also--at three denarii (2 shillings) each, and a single
possessor of a fish-pond 2000 -muraenae-; and the fishes left behind
by Lucius Lucullus brought 40,000 sesterces (400 pounds).
As may readily be conceived, under such circumstances any one
who followed this occupation industriously and intelligently
might obtain very large profits with a comparatively small outlay
of capital.  A small bee-breeder of this period sold from his thyme-
garden not larger than an acre in the neighbourhood of Falerii
honey to an average annual amount of at least 10,000 sesterces
(100 pounds).  The rivalry of the growers of fruit was carried so far,
that in elegant villas the fruit-chamber lined with marble
was not unfrequently fitted up at the same time as a dining-room,
and sometimes fine fruit acquired by purchase was exhibited there
as of home growth.  At this period the cherry from Asia Minor
and other foreign fruit-trees were first planted in the gardens of Italy.
The vegetable gardens, the beds of roses and violets in Latium
and Campania, yielded rich produce, and the "market for dainties"
(-forum cupedinis-) by the side of the Via Sacra, where fruits,
honey, and chaplets were wont to be exposed for sale,
played an important part in the life of the capital.  Generally
the management of estates, worked as they were on the planter-system,
had reached in an economic point of view a height scarcely
to be surpassed.  The valley of Rieti, the region round the Fucine lake,
the districts on the Liris and Volturnus, and indeed Central Italy
in general, were as respects husbandry in the most flourishing condition;
even certain branches of industry, which were suitable accompaniments
of the management of an estate by means of slaves, were taken up
by intelligent landlords, and, where the circumstances were favourable,
inns, weaving factories, and especially brickworks were constructed
on the estate.  The Italian producers of wine and oil in particular
not only supplied the Italian markets, but carried on also
in both articles a considerable business of transmarine exportation.
A homely professional treatise of this period compares Italy
to a great fruit-garden; and the pictures which a contemporary poet
gives of his beautiful native land, where the well-watered meadow,
the luxuriant corn-field, the pleasant vine-covered hill are fringed
by the dark line of the olive-trees--where the "ornament" of the land,
smiling in varied charms, cherishes the loveliest gardens
in its bosom and is itself wreathed round by food-producing trees--
these descriptions, evidently faithful pictures of the landscape
daily presented to the eye of the poet, transplant us
into the most flourishing districts of Tuscany and Terra di Lavoro.
The pastoral husbandry, it is true, which for reasons formerly explained
was always spreading farther especially in the south and south-east
of Italy, was in every respect a retrograde movement; but it too
participated to a certain degree in the general progress of agriculture;
much was done for the improvement of the breeds, e. g. asses for breeding
brought 60,000 sesterces (600 pounds), 100,000 (1000 pounds),
and even 400,000 (4000 pounds).  The solid Italian husbandry
obtained at this period, when the general development of intelligence
and abundance of capital rendered it fruitful, far more brilliant results
than ever the old system of small cultivators could have given;
and was carried even already beyond the bounds of Italy,
for the Italian agriculturist turned to account large tracts
in the provinces by rearing cattle and even cultivating corn.

Money-Dealing

In order to show what dimensions money-dealing assumed by the side
of this estate-husbandry unnaturally prospering over the ruin
of the small farmers, how the Italian merchants vying with the Jews
poured themselves into all the provinces and client-states
of the empire, and how all capital ultimately flowed to Rome,
it will be sufficient, after what has been already said, to point
to the single fact that in the money-market of the capital the regular
rate of interest at this time was six per cent, and consequently
money there was cheaper by a half than it was on an average
elsewhere in antiquity.

Social Disproportion

In consequence of this economic system based both in its agrarian
and mercantile aspects on masses of capital and on speculation,
there arose a most fearful disproportion in the distribution
of wealth.  The often-used and often-abused phrase of a commonwealth
composed of millionaires and beggars applies perhaps nowhere
so completely as to the Rome of the last age of the republic;
and nowhere perhaps has the essential maxim of the slave-state--
that the rich man who lives by the exertions of his slaves
is necessarily respectable, and the poor man who lives by the labour
of his hands is necessarily vulgar--been recognized with so terrible
a precision as the undoubted principle underlying all public
and private intercourse.(51)  A real middle class in our sense
of the term there was not, as indeed no such class can exist
in any fully-developed slave-state; what appears as if it were
a good middle class and is so in a certain measure, is composed
of those rich men of business and landholders who are so uncultivated
or so highly cultivated as to content themselves within the sphere
of their activity and to keep aloof from public life.  Of the men
of business--a class, among whom the numerous freedmen and other
upstarts, as a rule, were seized with the giddy fancy of playing
the man of quality--there were not very many who showed so much judgment.
A model of this sort was the Titus Pomponius Atticus frequently mentioned
in the accounts of this period.  He acquired an immense fortune
partly from the great estate-farming which he prosecuted in Italy
and Epirus, partly from his money-transactions which ramified throughout
Italy, Greece, Macedonia, and Asia Minor; but at the same time
he continued to be throughout the simple man of business,
did not allow himself to be seduced into soliciting office
or even into monetary transactions with the state,
and, equally remote from the avaricious niggardliness and from the prodigal
and burdensome luxury of his time--his table, for instance,
was maintained at a daily cost of 100 sesterces (1 pound)--
contented himself with an easy existence appropriating to itself
the charms of a country and a city life, the pleasures of intercourse
with the best society of Rome and Greece, and all the enjoyments
of literature and art.

More numerous and more solid were the Italian landholders
of the old type.  Contemporary literature preserves in the description
of Sextus Roscius, who was murdered amidst the proscriptions of 673,
the picture of such a rural nobleman (-pater familias rusticanus-);
his wealth, estimated at 6,000,000 sesterces (60,000 pounds),
is mainly invested in his thirteen landed estates; he attends
to the management of it in person systematically and with enthusiasm;
he comes seldom or never to the capital, and, when he does appear there,
by his clownish manners he contrasts not less with the polished senator
than the innumerable hosts of his uncouth rural slaves
with the elegant train of domestic slaves in the capital.
Far more than the circles of the nobility with their cosmopolitan
culture and the mercantile class at home everywhere and nowhere,
these landlords and the "country towns" to which they essentially
gave tone (-municipia rusticana-) preserved as well the discipline
and manners as the pure and noble language of their fathers.
The order of landlords was regarded as the flower of the nation;
the speculator, who has made his fortune and wishes to appear among
the notables of the land, buys an estate and seeks, if not to become
himself the squire, at any rate to rear his son with that view.
We meet the traces of this class of landlords, wherever a national
movement appears in politics, and wherever literature puts forth
any fresh growth; from it the patriotic opposition to the new monarchy
drew its best strength; to it belonged Varro, Lucretius, Catullus;
and nowhere perhaps does the comparative freshness of this landlord-life
come more characteristically to light than in the graceful Arpinate
introduction to the second book of Cicero's treatise De Legibus--
a green oasis amidst the fearful desert of that equally empty
and voluminous writer.

The Poor

But the cultivated class of merchants and the vigorous order
of landlords were far overgrown by the two classes that gave
tone to society--the mass of beggars, and the world of quality proper.
We have no statistical figures to indicate precisely the relative
proportions of poverty and riches for this epoch; yet we may
here perhaps again recall the expression which a Roman statesman
employed some fifty years before(52)--that the number of families
of firmly-established riches among the Roman burgesses did not
amount to 2000.  The burgess-body had since then become different;
but clear indications attest that the disproportion between
poor and rich had remained at least as great.  The increasing
impoverishment of the multitude shows itself only too plainly
in their crowding to the corn-largesses and to enlistment in the army;
the corresponding increase of riches is attested expressly
by an author of this generation, when, speaking of the circumstances
of the Marian period, he describes an estate of 2,000,000 sesterces
(20,000 pounds) as "riches according to the circumstances
of that day"; and the statements which we find as to the property
of individuals lead to the same conclusion.  The very rich
Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus promised to twenty thousand soldiers
four -iugera- of land each, out of his own property; the estate
of Pompeius amounted to 70,000,000 sesterces (700,000 pounds);
that of Aesopus the actor to 20,000,000 (200,000 pounds); Marcus Crassus,
the richest of the rich, possessed at the outset of his career,
7,000,000 (70,000 pounds), at its close, after lavishing enormous
sums on the people, 170,000,000 sesterces (1,700,000 pounds).
The effect of such poverty and such riches was on both sides
an economic and moral disorganization outwardly different, but at bottom
of the same character.  If the common man was saved from starvation
only by support from the resources of the state, it was the necessary
consequence of this mendicant misery--although it also reciprocally
appears as a cause of it--that he addicted himself to the beggar's
laziness and to the beggar's good cheer.  The Roman plebeian
was fonder of gazing in the theatre than of working; the taverns
and brothels were so frequented, that the demagogues found their
special account in gaining the  possessors of such establishments
over to their interests.  The gladiatorial games--which revealed,
at the same time that they fostered, the worst demoralization
of the ancient world--had become so flourishing that a lucrative business
was done in the sale of the programmes for them; and it was at this time
that the horrible innovation was adopted by which the decision
as to the life or death of the vanquished became dependent,
not on the law of duel or on the pleasure of the victor,
but onthe caprice of the onlooking public, and according to its signal
the victor either spared or transfixed his prostrate antagonist.
The trade of fighting had so risen or freedom had so fallen in value,
that the intrepidity and the emulation, which were lacking
on the battle fields of this age, were universal in the armies
of the arena and, where the law of the duel required, every gladiator
allowed himself to be stabbed mutely and without shrinking; that in fact
free men not unfrequently sold themselves to the contractors for board
and wages as gladiatorial slaves.  The plebeians of the fifth century
had also suffered want and famine, but they had not sold their freedom;
and still less would the jurisconsults of that period have lent
themselves to pronounce the equally immoral and illegal contract
of such a gladiatorial slave "to let himself be chained, scourged,
burnt or killed without opposition, if the laws of the institution
should so require" by means of unbecoming juristic subtleties
as a contract lawful and actionable.

Extravagance

In the world of quality such things did not occur, but at bottom
it was hardly different, and least of all better.  In doing nothing
the aristocrat boldly competed with the proletarian; if the latter
lounged on the pavement, the former lay in bed till far on
in the day.  Extravagance prevailed here as unbounded as it was
devoid of taste.  It was lavished on politics and on the theatre,
of course to the corruption of both; the consular office was purchased
at an incredible price--in the summer of 700 the first voting-division
alone was paid 10,000,000 sesterces (100,000 pounds)--
and all the pleasure of the man of culture in the drama was spoilt
by the insane luxury of decoration.  Rents in Rome appear to have been
on an average four times as high as in the country-towns;
a house there was once sold for 15,000,000 sesterces (150,000 pounds).
The house of Marcus Lepidus (consul in 676) which was at the time
of the death of Sulla the finest in Rome, did not rank a generation
afterwards even as the hundredth on the list of Roman palaces.
We have already mentioned the extravagance practised in the matter
of country-houses; we find that 4,000,000 sesterces (40,000 pounds)
were paid for such a house, which was valued chiefly for its fishpond;
and the thoroughly fashionable grandee now needed at least two villas--
one in the Sabine or Alban mountains near the capital, and a second
in the vicinity of the Campanian baths--and in addition if possible
a garden immediately outside of the gates of Rome.  Still more irrational
than these villa-palaces were the palatial sepulchres, several of which
still existing at the present day attest what a lofty pile of masonry
the rich Roman needed in order that he might die as became his rank.
Fanciers of horses and dogs too were not wanting; 24,000 sesterces
(240 pounds) was no uncommon price for a showy horse.  They indulged
in furniture of fine wood--a table of African cypress-wood
cost 1,000,000 sesterces (10,000 pounds); in dresses of purple stuffs
or transparent gauzes accompanied by an elegant adjustment of their folds
before the mirror--the orator Hortensius is said to have brought
an action of damages against a colleague because he ruffled his dress
in a crowd; in precious stones and pearls, which first at this period
took the place of the far more beautiful and more artistic
ornaments of gold--it was already utter barbarism, when at the triumph
of Pompeius over Mithradates the image of the victor appeared
wrought wholly of pearls, and when the sofas and the shelves
in the dining-hall were silver-mounted and even the kitchen-utensils
were made of silver.  In a similar spirit the collectors of this period
took out the artistic medallions from the old silver cups,
to set them anew in vessels of gold.  Nor was there any lack
of luxury also in travelling.  "When the governor travelled,"
Cicero tells us as to one of the Sicilian governors, "which of course
he did not in winter, but only at the beginning of spring--
not the spring of the calendar but the beginning of the season of roses--
he had himself conveyed, as was the custom with the kings of Bithynia,
in a litter with eight bearers, sitting on a cushion of Maltese gauze
stuffed with rose-leaves, with one garland on his head, and a second
twined round his neck, applying to his nose a little smelling bag
of fine linen, with minute meshes, filled with roses; and thus
he had himself carried even to his bed chamber."

Table Luxury

But no sort of luxury flourished so much as the coarsest of all--
the luxury of the table.  The whole villa arrangements and the whole
villa life had ultimate reference to dining; not only had they
different dining-rooms for winter and summer, but dinner was served
in the picture-gallery, in the fruit-chamber, in the aviary,
or on a platform erected in the deer-park, around which,
when the bespoken "Orpheus" appeared in theatrical costume
and blew his flourish, the duly-trained roes and wild boars congregated.
Such was the care bestowed on decoration; but amidst all this
the reality was by no means forgotten.  Not only was the cook
a graduate in gastronomy, but the master himself often acted
as the instructor of his cooks.  The roast had been long ago
thrown into the shade by marine fishes and oysters; now the Italian
river-fishes were utterly banished from good tables, and Italian
delicacies and Italian wines were looked on as almost vulgar.
Now even at the popular festivals there were distributed,
besides the Italian Falerian, three sorts of foreign wine--Sicilian,
Lesbian, Chian, while a generation before it had been sufficient
even at great banquets to send round Greek wine once; in the cellar
of the orator Hortensius there was found a stock of 10,000 jars
(at 33 quarts) of foreign wine.  It was no wonder that the Italian
wine-growers began to complain of the competition of the wines
from the Greek islands.  No naturalist could ransack land and sea
more zealously for new animals and plants, than the epicures of that day
ransacked them for new culinary dainties.(53)  The circumstance
of the guest taking an emetic after a banquet, to avoid the consequences
of the varied fare set before him, no longer created surprise.
Debauchery of every sort became so systematic and aggravated
that it found its professors, who earned a livelihood by serving
as instructors of the youth of quality in the theory
and practice of vice.

Debt

It will not be necessary to dwell longer on this confused picture,
so monotonous in its variety; and the less so, that the Romans
were far from original in this respect, and confined themselves
to exhibiting a copy of the Helleno-Asiatic luxury still more
exaggerated and stupid than their model.  Plutos naturally devours
his children as well as Kronos; the competition for all these
mostly worthless objects of fashionable longing so forced up prices,
that those who swam with the stream found the most colossal estate
melt away in a short time, and even those, who only for credit's sake
joined in what was most necessary, saw their inherited
and firmly- established wealth rapidly undermined.  The canvass
for the consulship, for instance, was the usual highway to ruin
for houses of distinction; and nearly the same description applies
to the games, the great buildings, and all those other pleasant,
doubtless, but expensive pursuits.  The princely wealth of that period
is only surpassed by its still more princely liabilities;
Caesar owed about 692, after deducting his assets, 25,000,000 sesterces
(250,000 pounds); Marcus Antonius, at the age of twenty-four
6,000,000 sesterces (60,000 pounds), fourteen years afterwards
40,000,000 (400,000 pounds); Curio owed 60,000,000 (600,000 pounds);
Milo 70,000,000 (700,000 pounds).  That those extravagant habits
of the Roman world of quality rested throughout on credit,
is shown by the fact that the monthly interest in Rome was once
suddenly raised from four to eight per cent, through the borrowing
of the different competitors for the consulship. Insolvency,
instead of leading in due time to a meeting of creditors
or at any rate to a liquidation which might at least place matters
once more on a clear footing, was ordinarily prolonged
by the debtor as much as possible; instead of selling his property
and especially his landed estates, he continued to borrow
and to present the semblance of riches, till the crash only became
the worse and the winding-up yielded a result like that of Milo,
in which the creditors obtained somewhat above four per cent
of the sums for which they ranked.  Amidst this startlingly rapid
transition from riches to bankruptcy and this systematic swindling,
nobody of course gained so much as the cool banker, who knew how to give
and refuse credit.  The relations of debtor and creditor thus returned
almost to the same point at which they had stood in the worst times
of the social crises of the fifth century; the nominal landowners
held virtually by sufferance of their creditors; the debtors were either
in servile subjection to their creditors, so that the humbler of them
appeared like freedmen in the creditor's train and those of higher rank
spoke and voted even in the senate at the nod of their creditor-lord;
or they were on the point of declaring war on property itself,
and either of intimidating their creditors by threats or getting rid
of them by conspiracy and civil war.  On these relations was based
the power of Crassus; out of them arose the insurrections--whose motto
was "a clear sheet"-of Cinna(54) and still more definitely of Catilina,
of Coelius, of Dolabella entirely resembling the battles between those
who had and those who had not, which a century before agitated
the Hellenic world.(55)  That amidst so rotten an economic condition
every financial or political crisis should occasion the most dreadful
confusion, was to be expected from the nature of the case; we need
hardly mention that the usual phenomena--the disappearance of capital,
the sudden depreciation of landed estates, innumerable bankruptcies,
and an almost universal insolvency--made their appearance now
during the civil war, just as they had done during the Social
and Mithradatic wars.(56)

Immortality

Under such circumstances, as a matter of course, morality
and family life were treated as antiquated things among all ranks
of society.  To be poor was not merely the sorest disgrace
and the worst crime, but the only disgrace and the only crime:
for money the statesman sold the state, and the burgess sold his freedom;
the post of the officer and the vote of the juryman were to be had
for money; for money the lady of quality surrendered her person
as well as the common courtesan; falsifying of documents and perjuries
had become so common that in a popular poet of this age an oath
is called "the plaster for debts." Men had forgotten what honesty was;
a person who refused a bribe was regarded not as an upright man,
but as a personal foe.  The criminal statistics of all times
and countries will hardly furnish a parallel to the dreadful picture
of crimes--so varied, so horrible, and so unnatural--which the trial
of Aulus Cluentius unrolls before us in the bosom of one of the most
respected families of an Italian country town.

Friendship

But while at the bottom of the national life the slime was thus
constantly accumulating more and more deleteriously and deeply,
so much the more smooth and glittering was the surface,
overlaid with the varnish of polished manners and universal friendship.
All the world interchanged visits; so that in the houses of quality
it was necessary to admit the persons presenting themselves every morning
for the levee in a certain order fixed by the master or occasionally
by the attendant in waiting, and to give audience only
to the more notable one by one, while the rest were more summarily admitted
partly in groups, partly en masse at the close--a distinction
which Gaius Gracchus, in this too paving the way for the new monarchy,
is said to have introduced.  The interchange of letters of courtesy
was carried to as great an extent as the visits of courtesy;
"friendly" letters flew over land and sea between persons who had
neither personal relations nor business with each other, whereas proper
and formal business-letters scarcely occur except where the letter
is addressed to a corporation.  In like manner invitations to dinner,
the customary new year's presents, the domestic festivals, were divested
of their proper character and converted almost into public ceremonials;
even death itself did not release the Roman from these attentions
to his countless "neighbours," but in order to die with due respectability
he had to provide each of them at any rate with a keepsake.  Just as
 in certain circles of our mercantile world, the genuine intimacy
of family ties and family friendships had so totally vanished
from the Rome of that day that the whole intercourse of business
and acquaintance could be garnished with forms and flourishes
which had lost all meaning, and thus by degrees the reality
came to be superseded by that spectral shadow of "friendship,"
which holds by no means the least place among the various evil spirits
brooding over the proscriptions and civil wars of this age.

Women

An equally characteristic feature in the brilliant decay of this period
was the emancipation of women.  In an economic point of view
the women had long since made themselves independent;(57)
in the present epoch we even meet with solicitors acting specially
for women, who officiously lend their aid to solitary rich ladies
in the management of their property and their lawsuits,
make an impression on them by their knowledge of business and law,
and thereby procure for themselves ampler perquisites and legacies
than other loungers on the exchange.  But it was not merely
from the economic guardianship of father or husband that women
felt themselves emancipated.  Love-intrigues of all sorts were constantly
in progress.  The ballet-dancers (-mimae-) were quite a match
for those of the present day in the variety of their pursuits
and the skill with which they followed them out; their primadonnas,
Cytheris and the like, pollute even the pages of history.
But their, as it were, licensed trade was very materially injured
by the free art of the ladies of aristocratic circles.  Liaisons
in the first houses had become so frequent, that only a scandal
altogether exceptional could make them the subject of special talk;
a judicial interference seemed now almost ridiculous.
An unparalleled scandal, such as Publius Clodius produced in 693
at the women's festival in the house of the Pontifex Maximus,
although a thousand times worse than the occurrences which fifty years
before had led to a series of capital sentences,(58) passed
almost without investigation and wholly without punishment.
The watering-place season--in April, when political business
was suspended and the world of quality congregated in Baiae and Puteoli--
derived its chief charm from the relations licit and illicit which,
along with music and song and elegant breakfasts on board or on shore,
enlivened the gondola voyages.  There the ladies held absolute sway;
but they were by no means content with this domain which rightfully
belonged to them; they also acted as politicians, appeared in party
conferences, and took part with their money and their intrigues
in the wild coterie-doings of the time.  Any one who beheld
these female statesmen performing on the stage of Scipio
and Cato and saw at their side the young fop--as with smooth chin,
delicate voice, and mincing gait, with headdress and neckerchiefs,
frilled robe, and women's sandals he copied the loose courtesan--
might well have a horror of the unnatural world, in which the sexes
seemed as though they wished to change parts.  What ideas as to divorce
prevailed in the circles of the aristocracy may be discerned
in the conduct of their best and most moral hero Marcus Cato,
who did not hesitate to separate from his wife at the request
of a friend desirous to marry her, and as little scrupled
on the death of this friend to marry the same wife a second time.
Celibacy and childlessness became more and more common, especially
among the upper classes.  While among these marriage had for long
been regarded as a burden which people took upon them at the best
in the public interest,(59) we now encounter even in Cato and those
who shared Cato's sentiments the maxim to which Polybius
a century before traced the decay of Hellas,(60) that it is the duty
of a citizen to keep great wealth together and therefore not to beget
too many children.  Where were the times, when the designation
"children-producer" (-proletarius-) had been a term of honour
for the Roman?

Depopulation of Italy

In consequence of such a social condition the Latin stock in Italy
underwent an alarming diminution, and its fair provinces were overspread
partly by parasitic immigrants, partly by sheer desolation.
A considerable portion of the population of Italy flocked
to foreign lands.  Already the aggregate amount of talent
and of working power, which the supply of Italian magistrates
and Italian garrisons for the whole domain of the Mediterranean
demanded, transcended the resources of the peninsula, especially
as the elements thus sent abroad were in great part lost for ever
to the nation.  For the more that the Roman community grew
into an empire embracing many nations, the more the governing aristocracy
lost the habit of looking on Italy as their exclusive home;
while of the men levied or enlisted for service a considerable portion
perished in the many wars, especially in the bloody civil war,
and another portion became wholly estranged from their native country
by the long period of service, which sometimes lasted for a generation.
In like manner with the public service, speculation kept
a portion of the landholders and almost the whole body
of merchants all their lives or at any rate for a long time
out of the country, and the demoralising itinerant life of trading
in particular estranged the latter altogether from civic existence
in the mother country and from the various conditions of family life.
As a compensation for these, Italy obtained on the one hand
the proletariate of slaves and freedmen, on the other hand
the craftsmen and traders flocking thither from Asia Minor, Syria,
and Egypt, who flourished chiefly in the capital and still more
in the seaport towns of Ostia, Puteoli, and Brundisium.(61)
In the largest and most important part of Italy however,
even such a substitution of impure elements for pure;
but the population was visibly on the decline.  Especially
was this true of the pastoral districts such as Apulia, the chosen land
of cattle-breeding, which is called by contemporaries the most deserted
part of Italy, and of the region around Rome, where the Campagna
was annually becoming more desolate under the constant reciprocal
action of the retrograde agriculture and the increasing malaria.
Labici, Gabii, Bovillae, once cheerful little country towns,
were so decayed, that it was difficult to find representatives of them
for the ceremony of the Latin festival.  Tusculum, although still
one of the most esteemed communities of Latium, consisted almost solely
of some genteel families who lived in the capital but retained
their native Tusculan franchise, and was far inferior in the number
of burgesses entitled to vote even to small communities
in the interior of Italy.  The stock of men capable of arms
in this district, on which Rome's ability to defend herself
had once mainly depended, had so totally vanished, that people read
with astonishment and perhaps with horror the accounts of the annals--
sounding fabulous in comparison with things as they stood--
respecting the Aequian and Volscian wars.  Matters were not so bad
everywhere, especially in the other portions of Central Italy
and in Campania; nevertheless, as Varro complains, "the once populous
cities of Italy," in general "stood desolate."

Italy under the Oligarchy

It is a dreadful picture--this picture of Italy under the rule
of the oligarchy.  There was nothing to bridge over or soften
the fatal contrast between the world of the beggars and the world
of the rich.  The more clearly and painfully this contrast
was felt on both sides--the giddier the height to which riches rose,
the deeper the abyss of poverty yawned--the more frequently,
amidst that changeful world of speculation and playing at hazard,
were individuals tossed from the bottom to the top and again
from the top to the bottom.  The wider the chasm by which the two worlds
were externally divided, the more completely they coincided
in the like annihilation of family life--which is yet the germ
and core of all nationality--in the like laziness and luxury,
the like unsubstantial economy, the like unmanly dependence,
the like corruption differing only in its tariff, the like criminal
demoralization, the like longing to begin the war with property.
Riches and misery in close league drove the Italians out of Italy,
and filled the peninsula partly with swarms of slaves, partly
with awful silence.  It is a terrible picture, but not one peculiar
to Italy; wherever the government of capitalists in a slave-state
has fully developed itself, it has desolated God's fair world
in the same way as rivers glisten in different colours, but a common
sewer everywhere looks like itself, so the Italy of the Ciceronian epoch
resembles substantially the Hellas of Polybius and still more decidedly
the Carthage of Hannibal's time, where in exactly similar fashion
the all-powerful rule of capital ruined the middle class, raised trade
and estate-farming to the highest prosperity, and ultimately led to a--
hypocritically whitewashed--moral and political corruption of the nation.
All the arrant sins that capital has been guilty of against nation
and civilization in the modern world, remain as far inferior
to the abominations of the ancient capitalist-states as the free man,
be he ever so poor, remains superior to the slave; and not until
the dragon-seed of North America ripens, will the world have again
similar fruits to reap.

Reforms of Caesar

These evils, under which the national economy of Italy
lay prostrate, were in their deepest essence irremediable,
and so much of them as still admitted of remedy depended essentially
for its amendment on the people and on time; for the wisest government
is as little able as the more skilful physician to give freshness
to the corrupt juices of the organism, or to do more in the case
of the deeper-rooted evils than to prevent those accidents
which obstruct the remedial power of nature in its working.
The peaceful energy of the new rule even of itself furnished
such a preventive, for by its means some of the worst excrescences
were done away, such as the artificial pampering of the proletariate,
the impunity of crimes, the purchase of offices, and various others.
But the government could do something more than simply abstain
from harm.  Caesar was not one of those over-wise people who refuse
to embank the sea, because forsooth no dike can defy some sudden influx
of the tide.  It is better, if a nation and its economy follow
spontaneously the path prescribed by nature; but, seeing that they
had got out of this path, Caesar applied all his energies to bring back
by special intervention the nation to its home and family life,
and to reform the national economy by law and decree.

Measures against Absentees from Italy
Measures for the Elevation of the Family

With a view to check the continued absence of the Italians from Italy
and to induce the world of quality and the merchants to establish
their homes in their native land, not only was the term of service
for the soldiers shortened, but men of senatorial rank were
altogether prohibited from taking up their abode out of Italy
except when on public business, while the other Italians
of marriageable age (from the twentieth to the fortieth year)
were enjoined not to be absent from Italy for more than three
consecutive years. In the same spirit Caesar had already,
in his first consulship on founding the colony of Capua kept specially
in view fathers who had several children;(62) and now as Imperator
he proposed extraordinary rewards for the fathers of numerous families,
while he at the same time as supreme judge of the nation
treated divorce and adultery with a rigour according
to Roman ideas unparalleled.

Laws Respecting Luxury

Nor did he even think it beneath his dignity to issue a detailed law
as to luxury--which, among other points, cut down extravagance
in building at least in one of its most irrational forms,
that of sepulchral monuments; restricted the use of purple robes
and pearls to certain times, ages, and classes, and totally prohibited
it in grown-up men; fixed a maximum for the expenditure of the table;
and directly forbade a number of luxurious dishes.  Such ordinances
doubtless were not new; but it was a new thing that the "master
of morals" seriously insisted on their observance, superintended
the provision-markets by means of paid overseers, and ordered
that the tables of men of rank should be examined by his officers
and the forbidden dishes on them should be confiscated.  It is true
that by such theoretical and practical instructions in moderation
as the new monarchical police gave to the fashionable world,
hardly more could be accomplished than the compelling luxury to retire
somewhat more into concealment; but, if hypocrisy is the homage
which vice pays to virtue, under the circumstances of the times
even a semblance of propriety established by police measures
was a step towards improvement not to be despised.

The Debt Crisis

The measures of Caesar for the better regulation of Italian monetary
and agricultural relations were of a graver character and promised
greater results.  The first question here related to temporary enactments
respecting the scarcity of money and the debt-crisis generally.
The law called forth by the outcry as to locked-up capital--that no one
should have on hand more than 60,000 sesterces (600 pounds) in gold
and silver cash--was probably only issued to allay the indignation
of the blind public against the usurers; the form of publication,
which proceeded on the fiction that this was merely the renewed
enforcing of an earlier law that had fallen into oblivion,
shows that Caesar was ashamed of this enactment, and it can hardly
have passed into actual application.  A far more serious question
was the treatment of the pending claims for debt, the complete remission
of which was vehemently demanded from Caesar by the party which called
itself by his name.  We have already mentioned, that he did not yield
to this demand;(63) but two important concessions were made
to the debtors, and that as early as 705.  First, the interest
in arrear was struck off,(64) and that which was paid was deducted
from the capital.  Secondly, the creditor was compelled to accept
the moveable and immoveable property of the debtor in lieu of payment
at the estimated value which his effects had before the civil war
and the general depreciation which it had occasioned.  The latter
enactment was not unreasonable; if the creditor was to be looked on
de facto as the owner of the property of his debtor to the amount
of the sum due to him, it was doubtless proper that he should bear
his share in the general depreciation of the property.  On the other hand
the cancelling of the payments of interest made or outstanding--
which practically amounted to this, that the creditors lost,
besides the interest itself, on an average 25 per cent of what
they were entitled to claim as capital at the time of the issuing
of the law--was in fact nothing else than a partial concession
of that cancelling of creditors' claims springing out of loans,
for which the democrats had clamoured so vehemently; and, however bad
may have been the conduct of the usurers, it is not possible thereby
to justify the retrospective abolition of all claims for interest
without distinction.  In order at least to understand this agitation
we must recollect how the democratic party stood towards
the question of interest.  The legal prohibition against
taking interest, which the old plebeian opposition had extorted
in 412,(65) had no doubt been practically disregarded by the nobility
which controlled the civil procedure by means of the praetorship,
but had still remained since that period formally valid;
and the democrats of the seventh century, who regarded themselves
throughout as the continuers of that old agitation as to privilege
and social position,(66) had maintained the illegality of payment
of interest at any time, and even already practically enforced
that principle, at least temporarily, in the confusion of the Marian
period.(67)  It is not credible that Caesar shared the crude views
of his party on the interest question; the fact, that, in his account
of the matter of liquidation he mentions the enactment
as to the surrender of the property of the debtor in lieu of payment
but is silent as to the cancelling of the interest, is perhaps
a tacit self-reproach.  But he was, like every party-leader,
dependent on his party and could not directly repudiate
the traditional maxims of the democracy in the question of interest;
the more especially when he had to decide this question,
not as the all-powerful conqueror of Pharsalus, but even before
his departure for Epirus.  But, while he permitted perhaps rather than
originated this violation of legal order and of property, it is certainly
his merit that that monstrous demand for the annulling of all claims
arising from loans was rejected; and it may perhaps be looked on
as a saving of his honour, that the debtors were far more indignant
at the--according to their view extremely unsatisfactory--concession
given to them than the injured creditors, and made under Caelius
and Dolabella those foolish and (as already mentioned) speedily frustrated
attempts to extort by riot and civil war what Caesar refused to them.

New Ordinance as to Bankruptcy

But Caesar did not confine himself to helping the debtor
for the moment; he did what as legislator he could, permanently
to keep down the fearful omnipotence of capital.  First of all
the great legal maxim was proclaimed, that freedom is not a possession
commensurable with property, but an eternal right of man,
of which the state is entitled judicially to deprive the criminal alone,
not the debtor.  It was Caesar, who, perhaps stimulated in this case
also by the more humane Egyptian and Greek legislation, especially
that of Solon,(68) introduced this principle--diametrically opposed
to the maxims of the earlier ordinances as to bankruptcy--
into the common law, where it has since retained its place undisputed.
According to Roman law the debtor unable to pay became the serf
of his creditor.(69)  The Poetelian law no doubt had allowed a debtor,
who had become unable to pay only through temporary embarrassments,
not through genuine insolvency, to save his personal freedom
by the cession of his property;(70) nevertheless for the really insolvent
that principle of law, though doubtless modified in secondary points,
had been in substance retained unaltered for five hundred years;
a direct recourse to the debtor's estate only occurred exceptionally,
when the debtor had died or had forfeited his burgess-rights
or could not be found.  It was Caesar who first gave an insolvent
the right--on which our modern bankruptcy regulations are based--
of formally ceding his estate to his creditors, whether it might suffice
to satisfy them or not, so as to save at all events his personal freedom
although with diminished honorary and political rights, and to begin
a new financial existence, in which he could only be sued
on account of claims proceeding from the earlier period and not protected
in the liquidation, if he could pay them without renewed financial ruin.

Usury Laws

While thus the great democrat had the imperishable honour of emancipating
personal freedom in principle from capital, he attempted moreover
to impose a police limit on the excessive power of capital by usury-laws.
He did not affect to disown the democratic antipathy to stipulations
for interest.  For Italian money-dealing there was fixed a maximum amount
of the loans at interest to be allowed in the case of the individual
capitalist, which appears to have been proportioned to the Italian
landed estate belonging to each, and perhaps amounted to half its value.
Transgressions of this enactment were, after the fashion of the procedure
prescribed in the republican usury-laws, treated as criminal offence
and sent before a special jury-commission.  If these regulations
were successfully carried into effect, every Italian man of business
would be compelled to become at the same time an Italian landholder,
and the class of capitalists subsisting merely on their interest
would disappear wholly from Italy.  Indirectly too the no less injurious
category of insolvent landowners who practically managed their estates
merely for their creditors was by this means materially curtailed,
inasmuch as the creditors, if they desired to continue their lending
business, were compelled to buy for themselves.  From this very fact
besides it is plain that Caesar wished by no means simply to renew
that naive prohibition of interest by the old popular party,
but on the contrary to allow the taking of interest within certain limits.
It is very probable however that he did not confine himself
to that injunction--which applied merely to Italy--of a maximum amount
of sums to be lent, but also, especially with respect to the provinces,
prescribed maximum rates for interest itself.  The enactments--
that it was illegal to take higher interest than 1 per cent per month,
or to take interest on arrears of interest, or in fine to make
a judicial claim for arrears of interest to a greater amount
than a sum equal to the capital--were, probably also after
the Graeco-Egyptian model,(71) first introduced in the Roman empire
by Lucius Lucullus for Asia Minor and retained there by his
better successors; soon afterwards they were transferred
to other provinces by edicts of the governors, and ultimately at least
part of them was provided with the force of law in all provinces
by a decree of the Roman senate of 704.  The fact that these Lucullan
enactments afterwards appear in all their compass as imperial law
and have thus become the basis of the Roman and indeed of modern
legislation as to interest, may also perhaps be traced back
to an ordinance of Caesar.

Elevation of Agriculture

Hand in hand with these efforts to guard against the ascendency
of capital went the endeavours to bring back agriculture to the path
which was most advantageous for the commonwealth.  For this purpose
the improvement of the administration of justice and of police
was very essential.  While hitherto nobody in Italy had been sure
of his life and of his moveable or immoveable property, while Roman
condottieri for instance, at the intervals when their gangs
were not helping to manage the politics of the capital,
applied themselves to robbery in the forests of Etruria or rounded off
the country estates of their paymasters by fresh acquisitions,
this sort of club-law was now at an end; and in particular
the agricultural population of all classes must have felt
the beneficial effects of the change.  The plans of Caesar
for great works also, which were not at all limited to the capital,
were intended to tell in this respect; the construction,
for instance, of a convenient high-road from Rome through
the passesof the Apennines to the Adriatic was designed to stimulate
the internal traffic of Italy, and the lowering the level
of the Fucine lake to benefit the Marsian farmers.  But Caesar
also sought by more direct measures to influence the state
of Italian husbandry.  The Italian graziers were required
to take at least a third of their herdsmen from freeborn adults,
whereby brigandage was checked and at the same time a source of gain
was opened to the free proletariate.

Distribution of Land

In the agrarian question Caesar, who already in his first consulship
had been in a position to regulate it,(72) more judicious
than Tiberius Gracchus, did not seek to restore the farmer-system
at any price, even at that of a revolution--concealed under
juristic clauses--directed against property; by him on the contrary,
as by every other genuine statesman, the security of that
which is property or is at any rate regarded by the public
as property was esteemed as the first and most inviolable
of all political maxims, and it was only within the limits assigned
by this maxim that he sought to accomplish the elevation of the Italian
small holdings, which also appeared to him as a vital question
for the nation.  Even as it was, there was much still left for him
in this respect to do.  Every private right, whether it was called
property or entitled heritable possession, whether traceable to Gracchus
or to Sulla, was unconditionally respected by him. On the other hand,
Caesar, after he had in his strictly economical fashion--
which tolerated no waste and no negligence even on a small scale--
instituted a general revision of the Italian titles to possession
by the revived commission of Twenty,(73) destined the whole
actual domain land of Italy (including a considerable portion
of the real estates that were in the hands of spiritual guilds
but legally belonged to the state) for distribution in the Gracchan
fashion, so far, of course, as it was fitted for agriculture;
the Apulian summer and the Samnite winter pastures belonging
to the state continued to be domain; and it was at least the design
of the Imperator, if these domains should not suffice, to procure
the additional land requisite by the purchase of Italian estates
from the public funds.  In the selection of the new farmers provision
was naturally made first of all for the veteran soldiers,
and as far as possible the burden, which the levy imposed
on the mother country, was converted into a benefit by the fact
that Caesar gave the proletarian, who was levied from it as a recruit,
back to it as a farmer; it is remarkable also that the desolate
Latin communities, such as Veii and Capena, seem to have been
preferentially provided with new colonists.  The regulation
of Caesar that the new owners should not be entitled to alienate
the lands received by them till after twenty years, was a happy medium
between the full bestowal of the right of alienation, which would have
brought the larger portion of the distributed land speedily
back into the hands of the great capitalists, and the permanent
restrictions on freedom of dealing in land which Tiberius Gracchus(74)
and Sulla (75) had enacted, both equally in vain.

Elevation of the Municipal System

Lastly while the government thus energetically applied itself
to remove the diseased, and to strengthen the sound, elements
of the Italian national life, the newly-regulated municipal system--
which had but recently developed itself out of the crisis
of the Social war in and alongside of the state-economy(76)--was intended
to communicate to the new absolute monarchy the communal life
which was compatible with it, and to impart to the sluggish circulation
of the noblest elements of public life once more a quickened action.
The leading principles in the two municipal ordinances issued in 705
for Cisalpine Gaul and in 709 for Italy,(77) the latter of which remained
the fundamental law for all succeeding times, are apparently, first,
the strict purifying of the urban corporations from all immoral elements,
while yet no trace of political police occurs; secondly, the utmost
restriction of centralization and the utmost freedom of movement
in the communities, to which there was even now reserved the election
of magistrates and an--although limited--civil and criminal jurisdiction.
The general police enactments, such as the restrictions on the right
of association,(78) came, it is true, into operation also here.

Such were the ordinances, by which Caesar attempted to reform
the Italian national economy.  It is easy both to show their
insufficiency, seeing that they allowed a multitude of evils
still to exist, and to prove that they operated in various respects
injuriously by imposing restrictions, some of which were
very severely felt, on freedom of dealing.  It is still easier
to show that the evils of the Italian national economy generally
were incurable.  But in spite of this the practical statesman
will admire the work as well as the master-workman.  It was already
no small achievement that, where a man like Sulla, despairing
of remedy, had contented himself with a mere formal reorganization,
the evil was seized in its proper seat and grappled with there;
and we may well conclude that Caesar with his reforms came as near
to the measure of what was possible as it was given to a statesman
and a Roman to come.  He could not and did not expect from them
the regeneration of Italy; but he sought on the contrary to attain
this in a very different way, for the right apprehension
of which it is necessary first of all to review the condition
of the provinces as Caesar found them.

Provinces

The provinces, which Caesar found in existence, were fourteen in number:
seven European--the Further and the Hither Spain, Transalpine Gaul,
Italian Gaul with Illyricum, Macedonia with Greece, Sicily,
Sardinia with Corsica; five Asiatic--Asia, Bithynia and Pontus,
Cilicia with Cyprus, Syria, Crete; and two African--Cyrene and Africa.
To these Caesar added three new ones by the erection of the two new
governorships of Lugdunese Gaul and Belgica(79) and by constituting
Illyricum a province by itself.(80)

Provincial Administration of the Oligarchy

In the administration of these provinces oligarchic misrule
had reached a point which, notwithstanding various noteworthy
performances in this line, no second government has ever attained
at least in the west, and which according to our ideas it seems
no longer possible to surpass.  Certainly the responsibility for this
rests not on the Romans alone.  Almost everywhere before their day
the Greek, Phoenician, or Asiatic rule had already driven out
of the nations the higher spirit and the sense of right and of liberty
belonging to better times.  It was doubtless bad, that every
accused provincial was bound, when asked, to appear personally
in Rome to answer for himself; that the Roman governor interfered
at pleasure in the administration of justice and the management
of the dependent communities, pronounced capital sentences, and cancelled
transactions of the municipal council; and that in case of war
he treated the militia as he chose and often infamously, as e. g.
when Cotta at the siege of the Pontic Heraclea assigned to the militia
all the posts of danger, to spare his Italians, and on the siege
not going according to his wish, ordered the heads of his engineers
to be laid at his feet.  It was doubtless bad, that no rule
of morality or of criminal law bound either the Roman administrators
or their retinue, and that violent outrages, rapes, and murders
with or without form of law were of daily occurrence in the provinces.
But these things were at least nothing new; almost everywhere
men had long been accustomed to be treated like slaves,
and it signified little in the long run whether a Carthaginian overseer,
a Syrian satrap, or a Roman proconsul acted as the local tyrant.
Their material well-being, almost the only thing for which
the provincials still cared, was far less disturbed by those occurrences,
which although numerous in proportion to the many tyrants yet affected
merely isolated individuals, than by the financial exactions pressing
heavily on all, which had never previously been prosecuted
with such energy.

The Romans now gave in this domain fearful proof of their old master
of money-matters.  We have already endeavoured to describe
the Roman system of provincial oppression in its modest
and rational foundations as well as in its growth and corruption
as a matter of course, the latter went on increasing.  The ordinary taxes
became far more oppressive from the inequality of their distribution
and from the preposterous system of levying them than from their
high amount.  As to the burden of quartering troops, Roman statesmen
themselves expressed the opinion that a town suffered nearly
to the same extent when a Roman army took up winter quarters
in it as when an enemy took it by storm.  While the taxation
in its original character had been an indemnification for the burden
of military defence undertaken by Rome, and the community
paying tribute had thus a right to remain exempt from ordinary service,
garrison-service was now--as is attested e. g. in the case
of Sardinia--for the most part imposed on the provincials,
and even in the ordinary armies, besides other duties, the whole
heavy burden of the cavalry-service was devolved on them.
The extraordinary contributions demanded--such as, the deliveries
of grain for little or no compensation to benefit the proletariate
of the capital; the frequent and costly naval armaments and coast-
defences in order to check piracy; the task of supplying works of art,
wild beasts, or other demands of the insane Roman luxury in the theatre
and the chase; the military requisitions in case of war--
were just as frequent as they were oppressive and incalculable.
A single instance may show how far things were carried.
During the three years' administration of Sicily by  Gaius Verres
the number of farmers in Leontini fell from 84 to 32, in Motuca
from 187 to 86, in Herbita from 252 to 120, in Agyrium from 250 to 80;
so that in four of the most fertile districts of Sicily 59 per cent
of the landholders preferred to let their fields lie fallow
than to cultivate them under such government.  And these landholders were,
as their small number itself shows and as is expressly stated, by no means
small farmers, but respectable planters and in great part Roman burgesses!

In the Client-States

In the client-states the forms of taxation were somewhat different,
but the burdens themselves were if possible still worse,
since in addition to the exactions of the Romans there came
those of the native courts.  In Cappadocia and Egypt the farmer
as well as the king was bankrupt; the former was unable to satisfy
the tax-collector, the latter was unable to satisfy his Roman creditor.
Add to these the exactions, properly so called, not merely
of the governor himself, but also of his "friends," each of whom fancied
that he had as it were a draft on the governor and a title accordingly
to come back from the province a made man.  The Roman oligarchy
in this respect completely resembled a gang of robbers,
and followed out the plundering of the provincials in a professional
and business-like manner; capable members of the gang set to work
not too nicely, for they had in fact to share the spoil
with the advocates and the jurymen, and the more they stole,
they did so the more securely.  The notion of honour in theft too
was already developed; the big robber looked down on the little,
and the latter on the mere thief, with contempt; any one, who had been
once for a wonder condemned, boasted of the high figure of the sums
which he was proved to have exacted.  Such was the behaviour
in the provinces of the successors of those men, who had been
accustomed to bring home nothing from their administration but the thanks
of the subjects and the approbation of their fellow-citizens.

The Roman Capitalists in the Provinces

But still worse, if possible, and still less subject to any control
was the havoc committed by the Italian men of business among
the unhappy provincials.  The most lucrative portions of the landed
property and the whole commercial and monetary business
in the provinces were concentrated in their hands.  The estates
in the transmarine regions, which belonged to Italian grandees,
were exposed to all the misery of management by stewards, and never
saw their owners; excepting possibly the hunting-parks, which occur
as early as this time in Transalpine Gaul with an area amounting
to nearly twenty square miles.  Usury flourished as it had never
flourished before.  The small landowners in Illyricum, Asia, and Egypt
managed their estates even in Varro's time in great part practically
as the debtor-slaves of their Roman or non-Roman creditors,
just as the plebeians in former days for their patrician lords.
Cases occurred of capital being lent even to urban communities
at four per cent per month.  It was no unusual thing for an energetic
and influential man of business to get either the title
of envoy(81) given to him by the senate or that of officer
by the governor, and, if possible, to have men put at his service
for the better prosecution of his affairs; a case is narrated
on credible authority, where one of these honourable martial bankers
on account of a claim against the town of Salamis in Cyprus
kept its municipal council blockaded in the town-house,
until five of the members had died of hunger.

Robberies and Damage by War

To these two modes of oppression, each of which by itself
was intolerable and which were always becoming better arranged to work
into each other's hands, were added the general calamities, for which
the Roman government was also in great part, at least indirectly,
responsible.  In the various wars a large amount of capital
was dragged away from the country and a larger amount destroyed
sometimes by the barbarians, sometimes by the Roman armies.
Owing to the worthlessness of the Roman land and maritime police,
brigands and pirates swarmed every where.  In Sardinia and the interior
of Asia Minor brigandage was endemic; in Africa and Further Spain
it became necessary to fortify all buildings constructed
outside of the city-enclosures with walls and towers.  The fearful evil
of piracy has been already described in another connection.(82)
The panaceas of the prohibitive system, with which the Roman governor
was wont to interpose when scarcity of money or dearth occurred,
as under such circumstances they could not fail to do--
the prohibition of the export of gold or grain from the province--
did not mend the matter.  The communal affairs were almost everywhere
embarrassed, in addition to the general distress, by local disorders
and frauds of the public officials.

The Conditions of the Provinces Generally

Where such grievances afflicted communities and individuals
not temporarily but for generations with an inevitable, steady,
and yearly-increasing oppression, the best regulated public
or private economy could not but succumb to them, and the most
unspeakable misery could not but extend over all the nations
from the Tagus to the Euphrates.  "All the communities," it is said
in a treatise published as early as 684, "are ruined"; the same truth
is specially attested as regards Spain and Narbonese Gaul,
the very provinces which, comparatively speaking, were still
in the most tolerable economic position.  In Asia Minor even towns
like Samos and Halicarnassus stood almost empty; legal slavery
seemed here a haven of rest compared with the torments to which
the free provincial succumbed, and even the patient Asiatic had become,
according to the descriptions of Roman statesmen themselves,
weary of life.  Any one who desires to fathom the depths to which man
can sink in the criminal infliction, and in the no less criminal
endurance, of all conceivable injustice, may gather together
from the criminal records of this period the wrongs which Roman grandees
could perpetrate and Greeks, Syrians, and Phoenicians could suffer.
Even the statesmen of Rome herself publicly and frankly conceded
that the Roman name was unutterably odious through all Greece
and Asia; and, when the burgesses of the Pontic Heraclea on one occasion
put to death the whole of the Roman tax-collectors, the only matter
for regret was that such things did not occur oftener.

Caesar and the Provinces

The Optimates scoffed at the new master who went in person
to inspect his "farms" one after the other; in reality the condition
of the several provinces demanded all the earnestness and all the wisdom
of one of those rare men, who redeem the name of king from being regarded
by the nations as merely a conspicuous example of human insufficiency.
The wounds inflicted had to be healed by time; Caesar took care
that they might be so healed, and that there should be
no fresh inflictions.

The Caesarian Magistrates

The system of administration was thoroughly remodelled.
The Sullan proconsuls and propraetors had been in their provinces
essentially sovereign and practically subject to no control;
those of Caesar were the well-disciplined servants of a stern master,
who from the very unity and life-tenure of his power sustained
a more natural and more tolerable relation to the subjects
than those numerous, annually changing, petty tyrants.  The governorships
were no doubt still distributed among the annually-retiring two consuls
and sixteen praetors, but, as the Imperator directly nominated
eight of the latter and the distribution of the provinces
among the competitors depended solely on him,(83) they were
in reality bestowed by the Imperator.  The functions also
of the governors were practically restricted.  The superintendence
of the administration of justice and the administrative control
of the communities remained in their hands; but their command
was paralyzed by the new supreme command in Rome and its adjutants
associated with the governor,(84) and the raising of the taxes
was probably even now committed in the provinces substantially
to imperial officials,(85) so that the governor was thenceforward
surrounded with an auxiliary staff which was absolutely dependent
on the Imperator in virtue either of the laws of the military
hierarchy or of the still stricter laws of domestic discipline.
While hitherto the proconsul and his quaestor had appeared as if
they were members of a gang of robbers despatched to levy contributions,
the magistrates of Caesar were present to protect the weak
against the strong; and, instead of the previous worse than useless
control of the equestrian or senatorian tribunals, they had to answer
for themselves at the bar of a just and unyielding monarch.
The law as to exactions, the enactments of which Caesar
had already in his first consulate made more stringent,
was applied by him against the chief commandants in the provinces
with an inexorable severity going even beyond its letter;
and the tax-officers, if indeed they ventured to indulge
in an injustice, atoned for it to their master, as slaves
and freedmen according to the cruel domestic law of that time
were wont to atone.

Regulation of Burdens

The extraordinary public burdens were reduced to the right proportion
and the actual necessity; the ordinary burdens were materially lessened.
We have already mentioned the comprehensive regulation of taxation;(86)
the extension of the exemptions from tribute, the general lowering
of the direct taxes, the limitation of the system of -decumae- to Africa
and Sardinia, the complete setting aside of middlemen in the collection
of the direct taxes, were most beneficial reforms for the provincials.
That Caesar after the example of one of his greatest democratic
predecessors, Sertorius,(87) wished to free the subjects from the burden
of quartering troops and to insist on the soldiers erecting
for themselves permanent encampments resembling towns, cannot indeed
be proved; but he was, at least after he had exchanged the part
of pretender for that of king, not the man to abandon the subject
to the soldier; and it was in keeping with his spirit, when the heirs
of his policy created such military camps, and then converted them
into towns which formed rallying-points for Italian civilization
amidst the barbarian frontier districts.

Influence on the Capitalist System

It was a task far more difficult than the checking of official
irregularities, to deliver the provincials from the oppressive
ascendency of Roman capital.  Its power could not be directly broken
without applying means which were still more dangerous than the evil;
the government could for the time being abolish only isolated abuses--
as when Caesar for instance prohibited the employment of the title
of state-envoy for financial purposes--and meet manifest acts of violence
and palpable usury by a sharp application of the general penal laws
and of the laws as to usury, which extended also to the provinces;(88)
but a more radical cure of the evil was only to be expected
from the reviving prosperity of the provincials under a better
administration.  Temporary enactments, to relieve the insolvency
of particular provinces, had been issued on several occasions
in recent times.  Caesar himself had in 694 when governor
of Further Spain assigned to the creditors two thirds
of the income of their debtors in order to pay themselves
from that source.  Lucius Lucullus likewise when governor of Asia Minor
had directly cancelled a portion of the arrears of interest
which had swelled beyond measure, and had for the remaining portion
assigned to the creditors a fourth part of the produce of the lands
of their debtors, as well as a suitable proportion of the profits
accruing to them from house-rents or slave-labour.  We are not expressly
informed that Caesar after the civil war instituted similar
general liquidations of debt in the provinces; yet from what
has just been remarked and from what was done in the case of Italy,(89)
it can hardly be doubted that Caesar likewise directed his efforts
towards this object, or at least that it formed part of his plan.

While thus the Imperator, as far as lay within human power,
relieved the provincials from the oppressions of the magistrates
and capitalists of Rome, it might at the same time be with certaint
expected from the government to which he imparted fresh vigour,
that it would scare off the wild border-peoples and disperse
the freebooters by land and sea, as the rising sun chases away
the mist.  However the old wounds might still smart, with Caesar
there appeared for the sorely-tortured subjects the dawn
of a more tolerable epoch, the first intelligent and humane government
that had appeared for centuries, and a policy of peace which rested
not on cowardice but on strength.  Well might the subjects above all
mourn along with the best Romans by the bier of the great liberator.

The Beginning of the Helleno-Italic State

But this abolition of existing abuses was not the main matter
in Caesar's provincial reform.  In the Roman republic, according
to the view of the aristocracy and democracy alike, the provinces
had been nothing but--what they were frequently called--country-estates
of the Roman people, and they were employed and worked out as such.
This view had now passed away.  The provinces as such were gradually
to disappear, in order to prepare for the renovated Helleno-Italic nation
a new and more spacious home, of whose several component parts no one
existed merely for the sake of another but all for each and each for all;
the new existence in the renovated home, the fresher, broader, grander
national life, was of itself to overbear the sorrows and wrongs
of the nation for which there was no help in the old Italy.  These ideas,
as is well known, were not new.  The emigration from Italy
to the provinces that had been regularly going on for centuries
had long since, though unconsciously on the part of the emigrants
themselves, paved the way for such an extension of Italy.  The first
who in a systematic way guided the Italians to settle beyond the bounds
of Italy was Gaius Gracchus, the creator of the Roman democratic monarchy,
the author of the Transalpine conquests, the founder of the colonies
of Carthage and Narbo.  Then the second statesman of genius
produced by the Roman democracy, Quintus Sertorius, began to introduce
the barbarous Occidentals to Latin civilization; he gave to the Spanish
youth of rank the Roman dress, and urged them to speak Latin
and to acquire the higher Italian culture at the training institute
founded by him in Osca.  When Caesar entered on the government,
a large Italian population--though, in great part, lacking stability
and concentration--already existed in all the provinces and client-
states.  To say nothing of the formally Italian towns in Spain
and southern Gaul, we need only recall the numerous troops of burgesses
raised by Sertorius and Pompeius in Spain, by Caesar in Gaul,
by Juba in Numidia, by the constitutional party in Africa, Macedonia,
Greece, Asia Minor, and Crete; the Latin lyre--ill-tuned doubtless--
on which the town-poets of Corduba as early as the Sertorian war
sang the praises of the Roman generals; and the translations
of Greek poetry valued on account of their very elegance of language,
which the earliest extra-Italian poet of note, the Transalpine
Publius Terentius Varro of the Aude, published
shortly after Caesar's death.

On the other hand the interpenetration of the Latin and Hellenic
character was, we might say, as old as Rome.  On occasion
of the union of Italy the conquering Latin nation had assimilated
to itself all the other conquered nationalities, excepting only
the Greek, which was received just as it stood without any attempt
at external amalgamation.  Wherever the Roman legionary went,
the Greek schoolmaster, no less a conqueror in his own way, followed;
at an early date we find famous teachers of the Greek language
settled on the Guadalquivir, and Greek was as well taught as Latin
in the institute of Osca.  The higher Roman culture itself
was in fact nothing else than the proclamation of the great gospel
of Hellenic manners and art in the Italian idiom; against the modest
pretension of the civilizing conquerors to proclaim it first of all
in their own language to the barbarians of the west the Hellene
at least could not loudly protest.  Already the Greek every where--
and, most decidedly, just where the national feeling was purest
and strongest, on the frontiers threatened by barbaric denationalization,
e. g. in Massilia, on the north coast of the Black Sea,
and on the Euphrates and Tigris--descried the  protector and avenger
of Hellenism in Rome; and in fact the foundation of towns by Pompeius
in the far east resumed after an interruption of centuries
the beneficent work of Alexander.

The idea of an Italo-Hellenic empire with two languages
and a single nationality was not new--otherwise it would have been
nothing but a blunder; but the development of it from floating projects
to a firmly-grasped conception, from scattered initial efforts
to the laying of a concentrated foundation, was the work of the third
and greatest of the democratic statesmen of Rome.

The Ruling Nations
The Jews

The first and most essential condition for the political
and national levelling of the empire was the preservation and extension
of the two nations destined to joint dominion, along with the absorption
as rapidly as possible of the barbarian races, or those termed barbarian
existing by their side.  In a certain sense we might no doubt name
along with Romans and Greeks a third nationality, which vied with them
in ubiquity in the world of that day, and was destined to play
no insignificant part in the new state of Caesar.  We speak of the Jews.
This remarkable people, yielding and yet tenacious, was in the ancient
as in the modern world everywhere and nowhere at home, and everywhere
and nowhere powerful.  The successors of David and Solomon were of hardly
more significance for the Jews of that age than Jerusalem for those
of the present day; the nation found doubtless for its religious
and intellectual unity a visible rallying-point in the petty kingdom
of Jerusalem, but the nation itself consisted not merely of the subjects
of the Hasmonaeans, but of the innumerable bodies of Jews
scattered through the whole Parthian and the whole Roman empire.
Within the cities of Alexandria especially and of Cyrene the Jews
formed special communities administratively and even locally distinct,
not unlike the "Jews' quarters" of our towns, but with a freer position
and superintended by a "master of the people" as superior judge
and administrator.  How numerous even in Rome the Jewish population
was already before Caesar's time, and how closely at the same time
the Jews even then kept together as fellow-countrymen, is shown
by the remark of an author of this period, that it was dangerous
for a governor to offend the Jews, in his province, because he might
then certainly reckon on being hissed after his return by the populace
of the capital.  Even at this time the predominant business of the Jews
was trade; the Jewish trader moved everywhere with the conquering Roman
merchant then, in the same way as he afterwards accompanied the Genoese
and the Venetian, and capital flowed in on all hands to the Jewish,
by the side of the Roman, merchants.  At this period too we encounter
the peculiar antipathy of the Occidentals towards this so thoroughly
Oriental race and their foreign opinions and customs.  This Judaism,
although not the most pleasing feature in the nowhere pleasing picture
of the mixture of nations which then prevailed, was nevertheless
a historical element developing itself in the natural course of things,
which the statesman could neither ignore nor combat, and which Caesar
on the contrary, just like his predecessor Alexander, with correct
discernment of the circumstances, fostered as far as possible.
While Alexander, by laying the foundation of Alexandrian Judaism,
did not much less for the nation than its own David by planning
the temple of Jerusalem, Caesar also advanced the interests of the Jews
in Alexandria and in Rome by special favours and privileges,
and protected in particular their peculiar worship against the Roman
as well as against the Greek local priests.  The two great men
of course did not contemplate placing the Jewish nationality
on an equal footing with the Hellenic or Italo-Hellenic.
But the Jew who has not like the Occidental received the Pandora's gift
of political organization, and stands substantially in a relation
of indifference to the state; who moreover is as reluctant
to give up the essence of his national idiosyncrasy, as he is ready
to clothe it with any nationality at pleasure and to adapt himself
up to a certain degree to foreign habits--the Jew was for this
very reason as it were made for a state, which was to be built
on the ruins of a hundred living polities and to be endowed
with a somewhat abstract and, from the outset, toned-down nationality.
Even in the ancient world Judaism was an effective leaven
of cosmopolitanism and of national decomposition, and to that extent
a specially privileged member in the Caesarian state, the polity
of which was strictly speaking nothing but a citizenship of the world,
and the nationality of which was at bottom nothing but humanity.

Hellenism

But the Latin and Hellenic nationalities continued to be
exclusively the positive elements of the new citizenship.
The distinctively Italian state of the republic was thus at an end;
but the rumour that Caesar was ruining Italy and Rome on purpose
to transfer the centre of the empire to the Greek east and to make
Ilion or Alexandria its capital, was nothing but a piece of talk--
very easy to be accounted for, but also very silly--of the angry
nobility.  On the contrary in Caesar's organizations the Latin
nationality always retained the preponderance; as is indicated
in the very fact that he issued all his enactments in Latin,
although those destined for the Greek-speaking countries were
at the same time issued in Greek.  In general he arranged the relations
of the two great nations in his monarchy just as his republican
predecessors had arranged them in the united Italy; the Hellenic
nationality was protected where it existed, the Italian was extended
as far as circumstances permitted, and the inheritance
of the races to be absorbed was destined for it.  This was necessary,
because an entire equalizing of the Greek and Latin elements
in the state would in all probability have in a very short time
occasioned that catastrophe which Byzantinism brought about
several centuries later; for the Greek element was superior
to the Roman not merely in all intellectual aspects, but also
in the measure of its predominance, and it had within Italy itself
in the hosts of Hellenes and half-Hellenes who migrated compulsorily
or voluntarily to Italy an endless number of apostles apparently
insignificant, but whose influence could not be estimated
too highly.  To mention only the most conspicuous phenomenon
in this respect, the rule of Greek lackeys over the Roman monarchs
is as old as the monarchy. The first in the equally long and repulsive
list of these personages is the confidential servant of Pompeius,
Theophanes of Mytilene, who by his power over his weak master
contributed probably more than any one else to the outbreak of the war
between Pompeius and Caesar.  Not wholly without reason he was
after his death treated with divine honours by his countrymen;
he commenced, forsooth, the -valet de chambre- government
of the imperial period, which in a certain measure was just
a dominion of the Hellenes over the Romans.  The government
had accordingly every reason not to encourage by its fostering action
the spread of Hellenism at least in the west.  If Sicily was not simply
relieved of the pressure of the -decumae- but had its communities
invested with Latin rights, which was presumably meant to be followed
in due time by full equalization with Italy, it can only have been
Caesar's design that this glorious island, which was at that time
desolate and had as to management passed for the greater part
into Italian hands, but which nature has destined to be not so much
a neighbouring land to Italy as rather the finest of its provinces,
should become altogether merged in Italy.  But otherwise
the Greek element, wherever it existed, was preserved and protected.
However political crises might suggest to the Imperator the demolition
of the strong pillars of Hellenism in the west and in Egypt, Massilia
and Alexandria were neither destroyed nor denationalized.

Latinizing

On the other hand the Roman element was promoted by the government
through colonization and Latinizing with all vigour and at the most
various points of the empire.  The principle, which originated
no doubt from a bad combination of formal law and brute force,
but was inevitably necessary in order to freedom in dealing
with the nations destined to destruction--that all the soil
in the provinces not ceded by special act of the government
to communities or private persons was the property of the state,
and the holder of it for the time being had merely an heritable
possession on sufferance and revocable at any time--was retained
also by Caesar and raised by him from a democratic party-theory
to a fundamental principle of monarchical law.

Cisalpine Gaul

Gaul, of course, fell to be primarily dealt with in the extension
of Roman nationality.  Cisalpine Gaul obtained throughout--
what a great part of the inhabitants had long enjoyed--
political equalization with the leading country by the admission
of the Transpadane communities into the Roman burgess-union,
which had for long been assumed by the democracy as accomplished,(90)
and was now (705) finally accomplished by Caesar.  Practically
this province had already completely Latinized itself during
the forty years which had elapsed since the bestowal of Latin rights.
The exclusives might ridicule the broad and gurgling accent
of the Celtic Latin, and miss "an undefined something of the grace
of the capital" in the Insubrian or Venetian, who as Caesar's legionary
had conquered for himself with his sword a place in the Roman Forum
and even in the Roman senate-house.  Nevertheless Cisalpine Gaul
with its dense chiefly agricultural population was even before
Caesar's time in reality an Italian country, and remained
for centuries the true asylum of Italian manners and Italian culture;
indeed the teachers of Latin literature found nowhere else
out of the capital so much encouragement and approbation.

The Province of Narbo

While Cisalpine Gaul was thus substantially merged in Italy,
the place which it had hitherto occupied was taken by the Transalpine
province, which had been converted by the conquests of Caesar
from a frontier into an inland province, and which by its vicinity
as well as by its climate was fitted beyond all other regions
to become in due course of time likewise an Italian land.
Thither principally, according to the old aim of the transmarine
settlements of the Roman democracy, was the stream of Italian
emigration directed.  There the ancient colony of Narbo was reinforced
by new settlers, and four new burgess-colonies were instituted
at Baeterrae (Beziers) not far from Narbo, at Arelate (Aries)
and Arausio (Orange) on the Rhone, and at the new seaport Forum Julii
(Frejus); while the names assigned to them at the same time preserved
the memory of the brave legions which had annexed northern Gaul
to the empire.(91) The townships not furnished with colonists appear,
at least for the most part, to have been led on toward Romanization
in the same way as Transpadane Gaul in former times(92) by the bestowal
of Latin urban rights; in particular Nemausus (Nimes), as the chief place
of the territory taken from the Massiliots in consequence of their revolt
against Caesar,(93)was converted from a Massiliot village into a Latin
urban community, and endowed with a considerable territory and even
with the right of coinage.(94)  While Cisalpine Gaul thus advanced
from the preparatory stage to full equality with Italy, the Narbonese
province advanced at the same time into that preparatory stage;
just as previously in Cisalpine Gaul, the most considerable
communities there had the full franchise, the rest Latin rights.

Northern Gaul

In the other non-Greek and non-Latin regions of the empire,
which were still more remote from the influence of Italy and the process
of assimilation, Caesar confined himself to the establishment
of several centres for Italian civilization such as Narbo had hitherto
been in Gaul, in order by their means to pave the way for a future
complete equalization.  Such initial steps can be pointed out
in all the provinces of the empire, with the exception of the poorest
and least important of all, Sardinia.  How Caesar proceeded
in Northern Gaul, we have already set forth;(95) the Latin language
there obtained throughout official recognition, though not yet
employed for all branches of public intercourse, and the colony
of Noviodunum (Nyon) arose on the Leman lake as the most northerly town
with an Italian constitution.

Spain

In Spain, which was presumably at that time the most densely peopled
country of the Roman empire, not merely were Caesarian colonists
settled in the important Helleno-Iberian seaport town of Emporiae
by the side of the old population; but, as recently-discovered
records have shown, a number of colonists probably taken
predominantly from the proletariate of the capital were provided for
in the town of Urso (Osuna), not far from Seville in the heart
of Andalusia, and perhaps also in several other townships
of this province.  The ancient and wealthy mercantile city of Gades,
whose municipal system Caesar even when praetor had remodelled
suitably to the times, now obtained from the Imperator the full rights
of the Italian -municipia-(705) and became--what Tusculum had been
in Italy(96)--the first extra-Italian community not founded by Rome
which was admitted into the Roman burgess-union.  Some years
afterwards (709) similar rights were conferred also on some other
Spanish communities, and Latin rights presumably on still more.

Carthage

In Africa the project, which Gaius Gracchus had not been allowed
to bring to an issue, was now carried out, and on the spot
where the city of the hereditary foes of Rome had stood, 3000 Italian
colonists and a great number of the tenants on lease and sufferance
resident in the Carthaginian territory were settled; and the new
"Venus-colony," the Roman Carthage, throve with amazing rapidity
under the incomparably favourable circumstances of the locality.
Utica, hitherto the capital and first commercial town in the province,
had already been in some measure compensated  beforehand,
apparently by the bestowal of Latin rights, for the revival
of its superior rival.  In the Numidian territory newly annexed
to the empire the important Cirta and the other communities assigned
to the Roman condottiere Publius Sittius for himself and his troops(97)
obtained the legal position of Roman military colonies.
The stately provincial towns indeed, which the insane fury of Juba
and of the desperate remnant of the constitutional party had converted
into ruins, did not revive so rapidly as they had been reduced to ashes,
and many a ruinous site recalled long afterwards this fatal period;
but the two new Julian colonies, Carthage and Cirta, became
and continued to be the centres of Africano-Roman civilization.

Corinth
The East

In the desolate land of Greece, Caesar, besides other plans
such as the institution of a Roman colony in Buthrotum (opposite Corfu),
busied himself above all with the restoration of Corinth.  Not only
was a considerable burgess-colony conducted thither, but a plan
was projected for cutting through the isthmus, so as to avoid
the dangerous circumnavigation of the Peloponnesus and to make
the whole traffic between Italy and Asia pass through the Corintho-
Saronic gulf.  Lastly even in the remote Hellenic east the monarch
called into existence Italian settlements; on the Black Sea,
for instance, at Heraclea and Sinope, which towns the Italian
colonists shared, as in the case of Emporiae, with the old inhabitants;
on the Syrian coast, in the important port of Berytus,
which like Sinope obtained an Italian constitution; and even in Egypt,
where a Roman station was established on the lighthouse-island
commanding the harbour of Alexandria.

Extension of the Italian Municipal Constitution to the Provinces

Through these ordinances the Italian municipal freedom was carried
into the provinces in a manner far more comprehensive than had been
previously the case.  The communities of full burgesses--that is,
all the towns of the Cisalpine province and the burgess-colonies
and burgess-municipia--scattered in Transalpine Gaul and elsewhere--
were on an equal footing with the Italian, in so far as they administered
their own affairs, and even exercised a certainly limited jurisdiction;
while on the other hand the more important processes came before
the Roman authorities competent to deal with them--as a rule the governor
of the province.(98)  The formally autonomous Latin and the other
emancipated communities-thus including all those of Sicily
and of Narbonese Gaul, so far as they were not burgess-communities,
and a considerable number also in the other provinces--had not merely
free administration, but  probably unlimited jurisdiction; so that
the governor was only entitled to interfere there by virtue of his--
certainly very arbitrary--administrative control.  No doubt even earlier
there had been communities of full burgesses within the provinces
of governors, such as Aquileia, and Narbo, and whole governors'
provinces, such as Cisalpine Gaul, had consisted of communities
with Italian constitution; but it was, if not in law, at least
in a political point of view a singularly important innovation,
that there was now a province which as well as Italy was peopled
solely by Roman burgesses,(99) and that others promised to become such.

Italy and the Provinces Reduced to One Level

With this disappeared the first great practical distinction
that separated Italy from the provinces; and the second--that ordinarily
no troops were stationed in Italy, while they were stationed
in the provinces--was likewise in the course of disappearing;
troops were now stationed only where there was a frontier to be defended,
and the commandants of the provinces in which this was not the case,
such as Narbo and Sicily, were officers only in name.  The formal
contrast between Italy and the provinces, which had at all times
depended on other distinctions,(100) continued certainly
even now to subsist, for Italy was the sphere of civil jurisdiction
and of consuls and praetors, while the provinces were districts
under the jurisdiction of martial law and subject to proconsuls
and propraetors; but the procedure according to civil and according
to martial law had for long been practically coincident,
and the different titles of the magistrates signified little
after the one Imperator was over all.

In all these various municipal foundations and ordinances--
which are traceable at least in plan, if not perhaps all in execution,
to Caesar--a definite system is apparent.  Italy was converted
from the mistress of the subject peoples into the mother
of the renovated Italo-Hellenic nation.  The Cisalpine province
completely equalized with the mother-country was a promise
and a guarantee that, in the monarchy of Caesar just as
 in the healthier times of the republic, every Latinized
district might expect to be placed on an equal footing
by the side of its elder sisters and of the mother herself.
On the threshold of full national and political equalization
with Italy stood the adjoining lands, the Greek Sicily
and the south of Gaul, which was rapidly becoming Latinized.
In a more remote stage of preparation stood the other provinces
of the empire, in which, just as hitherto in southern Gaul Narbo
had been a Roman colony, the great maritime cities--Emporiae, Gades,
Carthage, Corinth, Heraclea in Pontus, Sinope, Berytus, Alexandria--
now became Italian or Helleno-Italian communities, the centres
of an Italian civilization even in the Greek east, the fundamental
pillars of the future national and political levelling of the empire.
The rule of the urban community of Rome over the shores
of the Mediterranean was at an end; in its stead came the new
Mediterranean state, and its first act was to atone for the two
greatest outrages which that urban community had perpetrated
on civilization.  While the destruction of the two greatest marts
of commerce in the Roman dominions marked the turning-point at which
the protectorate of the Roman community degenerated into political
tyrannizing over, and financial exaction from, the subject lands,
the prompt and brilliant restoration of Carthage and Corinth marked
the foundation of the new great commonwealth which was to train up
all the regions on the Mediterranean to national and political
equality, to union in a genuine state.  Well might Caesar bestow
on the city of Corinth in addition to its far-famed ancient name
the new one of "Honour to Julius" (-Lavs Jvli-).

Organization of the New Empire

While thus the new united empire was furnished with a national character,
which doubtless necessarily lacked individuality and was rather
an inanimate product of art than a fresh growth of nature,
it further had need of unity in those institutions which express
the general life of nations--in constitution and administration,
in religion and jurisprudence, in money, measures, and weights;
as to which, of course, local diversities of the most varied character
were quite compatible with essential union.  In all these departments
we can only speak of the initial steps, for the thorough formation
of the monarchy of Caesar into an unity was the work of the future,
and all that he did was to lay the foundation for the building
of centuries.  But of the lines, which the great man drew in these
departments, several can still be recognized; and it is more pleasing
to follow him here, than in the task of building from the ruins
of the nationalities.

Census of the Empire

As to constitution and administration, we have already noticed
elsewhere the most important elements of the new unity--
the transition of the sovereignty from the municipal council of Rome
to the sole master of the Mediterranean monarchy; the conversion
of that municipal council into a supreme imperial council representing
Italy and the provinces; above all, the transference--now commenced--
of the Roman, and generally of the Italian, municipal organization
to the provincial communities.  This latter course--the bestowal
of Latin, and thereafter of Roman, rights on the communities
ripe for full admission to the united state--gradually of itself
brought about uniform communal arrangements.  In one respect alone
this process could not be waited for.  The new empire needed
immediately an institution which should place before the government
at a glance the principal bases of administration--the proportions
of population and property in the different communities--
in other words an improved census.  First the census of Italy
was reformed.  According to Caesar's ordinance(101)--which probably,
indeed, only carried out the arrangements which were, at least
as to principle, adopted in consequence of the Social war--
in future, when a census took place in the Roman community,
there were to be simultaneously registered by the highest authority
in each Italian community the name of every municipal burgess
and that of his father or manumitter, his district, his age,
and his property; and these lists were to be furnished to the Roman
censor early enough to enable him to complete in proper time
the general list of Roman burgesses and of Roman property.
That it was Caesar's intention to introduce similar institutions
also in the provinces is attested partly by the measurement
and survey of the whole empire ordered by him, partly by the nature
of the arrangement itself; for it in fact furnished the general
instrument appropriate for procuring, as well in the Italian
as in the non-Italian communities of the state, the information
requisite for the central administration.  Evidently here too
it was Caesar's intention to revert to the traditions
of the earlier republican times, and to reintroduce the census
of the empire, which the earlier republic had effected--
essentially in the same way as Caesar effected the Italian--
by analogous extension of the institution of the urban censorship
with its set terms and other essential rules to all the subject
communities of Italy and Sicily.(102)  This had been
one of the first institutions which the torpid aristocracy allowed
to drop, and in this way deprived the supreme administrative authority
of any view of the resources in men and taxation at its disposal
and consequently of all possibility of an effective control.(103)
The indications still extant, and the very connection of things,
show irrefragably that Caesar made preparations to renew
the general census that had been obsolete for centuries.

Religion of the Empire

We need scarcely say that in religion and in jurisprudence
no thorough levelling could be thought of; yet with all toleration
towards local faiths and municipal statutes the new state needed
a common worship corresponding to the Italo-Hellenic nationality
and a general code of law superior to the municipal statutes.
It needed them; for de facto both were already in existence.
In the field of religion men had for centuries been busied
in fusing together the Italian and Hellenic worships partly
by external adoption, partly by internal adjustment of their respective
conceptions of the gods; and owing to the pliant formless character
of the Italian gods, there had been no great difficulty in resolving
Jupiter into Zeus, Venus into Aphrodite, and so every essential idea
of the Latin faith into its Hellenic counterpart. The Italo-Hellenic
religion stood forth in its outlines ready-made; how much
in this very department men were conscious of having gone beyond
the specifically Roman point of view and advanced towards
an Italo-Hellenic quasi-nationality, is shown by the distinction made
in the already-mentioned theology of Varro between the "common" gods,
that is, those acknowledged by Romans and Greeks, and the special gods
of the Roman community.

Law of the Empire

So far as concerns the field of criminal and police law,
where the government more directly interferes and the necessities
of the case are substantially met by a judicious legislation,
there was no difficulty in attaining, in the way of legislative action,
that degree of material uniformity which certainly was in this department
needful for the unity of the empire.  In the civil law again,
where the initiative belongs to commercial intercourse and merely
the formal shape to the legislator, the code for the united empire,
which the legislator certainly could not have created, had been already
long since developed in a natural way by commercial intercourse itself.
The Roman urban law was still indeed legally based on the embodiment
of the Latin national law contained in the Twelve Tables.
Later laws had doubtless introduced various improvements
of detail suited to the times, among which the most important
was probably the abolition of the old inconvenient mode
of commencing a process through standing forms of declaration
by the parties(104) and the substitution of an instruction drawn up
in writing by the presiding magistrate for the single juryman
(formula): but in the main the popular legislation had only piled upon
that venerable foundation an endless chaos of special laws
long since in great part antiquated and forgotten, which can
only be compared to the English statute-law.  The attempts to impart
to them scientific shape and system had certainly rendered
the tortuous paths of the old civil law accessible, and thrown light
upon them;(105) but no Roman Blackstone could remedy the fundamental
defect, that an urban code composed four hundred years ago
with its equally diffuse and confused supplements was now to serve
as the law of a great state.

The New Urban Law or the Edict

Commercial intercourse provided for itself a more thorough remedy.
The lively intercourse between Romans and non-Romans had long ago
developed in Rome an international private law (-ius gentium-;(106)),
that is to say, a body of maxims especially relating to commercial
matters, according to which Roman judges pronounced judgment,
when a cause could not be decided either according to their own
or any other national code and they were compelled--setting aside
the peculiarities of Roman, Hellenic, Phoenician and other law--
to revert to the common views of right underlying all dealings.
The formation of the newer law attached itself to this basis.
In the first place as a standard for the legal dealings
of Roman burgesses with each other, it de facto substituted
for the old urban law, which had become practically useless,
a new code based in substance on a compromise between the national law
of the Twelve Tables and the international law or so-called
law of nations.  The former was essentially adhered to,
though of course with modifications suited to the times,
in the law of marriage, family, and inheritance; whereas
in all regulations which concerned dealings with property,
and consequently in reference to ownership and contracts,
the international law was the standard; in these matters indeed
various important arrangements were borrowed even from local
provincial law, such as the legislation as to usury,(107)
and the institution of -hypotheca-.  Through whom, when,
and how this comprehensive innovation came into existence,
whether at once or gradually, whether through one or several authors,
are questions to which we cannot furnish a satisfactory answer.
We know only that this reform, as was natural, proceeded
in the first instance from the urban court; that it first took
formal shape in the instructions annually issued by the -praetor
urbanus-, when entering on office, for the guidance of the parties
in reference to the most important maxims of law to be observed
in the judicial year then beginning (-edictum annuum- or -perpetuum
praetoris urbani de iuris dictione-); and that, although various
preparatory steps towards it may have been taken in earlier times,
it certainly only attained its completion in this epoch.  The new code
was theoretic and abstract, inasmuch as the Roman view of law
had therein divested itself of such of its national peculiarities
as it had become aware of; but it was at the same time practical
and positive, inasmuch as it by no means faded away into the dim
twilight of general equity or even into the pure nothingness
of the so-called law of nature, but was applied by definite
functionaries for definite concrete cases according to fixed rules,
and was not merely capable of, but had already essentially received,
a legal embodiment in the urban edict.  This code moreover corresponded
in matter to the wants of the time, in so far as it furnished
the more convenient forms required by the increase of intercourse
for legal procedure, for acquisition of property, and for conclusion
of contracts.  Lastly, it had already in the main become subsidiary law
throughout the compass of the Roman empire, inasmuch as--
while the manifold local statutes were retained for those legal relations
which were not directly commercial, as well as for local transactions
between members of the same legal district--dealings relating
to property between subjects of the empire belonging to different
legal districts were regulated throughout after the model
of the urban edict, though not applicable de jure to these cases,
both in Italy and in the provinces.  The law of the urban edict
had thus essentially the same position in that age which the Roman law
has occupied in our political development; this also is, so far as
such opposites can be combined, at once abstract and positive;
this also recommended itself by its (compared with the earlier
legal code) flexible forms of intercourse, and took its place by the side
of the local statutes as universal subsidiary law.  But the Roman
legal development had an essential advantage over ours in this,
that the denationalized legislation appeared not, as with us,
prematurely and by artificial birth, but at the right time
and agreeably to nature.

Caesar's Project of Codification

Such was the state of the law as Caesar found it.  If he projected
the plan for a new code, it is not difficult to say what were
his intentions.  This code could only comprehend the law of Roman
burgesses, and could be a general code for the empire merely so far as
a code of the ruling nation suitable to the times could not
but of itself become general subsidiary law throughout the compass
of the empire.  In criminal law, if the plan embraced this at all,
there was needed only a revision and adjustment of the Sullan
ordinances.  In civil law, for a state whose nationality
was properly humanity, the necessary and only possible formal shape
was to invest that urban edict, which had already spontaneously grown
out of lawful commerce, with the security and precision of statute-law.
The first step towards this had been taken by the Cornelian law
of 687, when it enjoined the judge to keep to the maxims set forth
at the beginning of his magistracy and not arbitrarily
to administer other law (108)--a regulation, which may well
be compared with the law of the Twelve Tables, and which became
almost as significant for the fixing of the later urban law
as that collection for the fixing of the earlier.  But although
after the Cornelian decree of the people the edict was no longer
subordinate to the judge, but the judge was by law subject to the edict;
and though the new code had practically dispossessed the old urban law
in judicial usage as in legal instruction--every urban judge
was still free at his entrance on office absolutely and arbitrarily
to alter the edict, and the law of the Twelve Tables with its additions
still always outweighed formally the urban edict, so that
in each individual case of collision the antiquated rule had to be
set aside by arbitrary interference of the magistrates,
and therefore, strictly speaking, by violation of formal law.
The subsidiary application of the urban edict in the court
of the -praetor peregrinus- at Rome and in the different provincial
judicatures was entirely subject to the arbitrary pleasure
of the individual presiding magistrates.  It was evidently necessary
to set aside definitely the old urban law, so far as it had not
been transferred to the newer, and in the case of the latter
to set suitable limits to its arbitrary alteration by each individual
urban judge, possibly also to regulate its subsidiary application
by the side of the local statutes.  This was Caesars design,
when he projected the plan for his code; for it could not have been
otherwise.  The plan was not executed; and thus that troublesome
state of transition in Roman jurisprudence was perpetuated
till this necessary reform was accomplished six centuries afterwards,
and then but imperfectly, by one of the successors of Caesar,
the Emperor Justinian.

Lastly, in money, measures, and weights the substantial equalization
of the Latin and Hellenic systems had long been in progress.
It was very ancient so far as concerned the definitions of weight
and the measures of capacity and of length indispensable for trade
and commerce,(109) and in the monetary system little more recent
than the introduction of the silver coinage.(110)  But these older
equations were not sufficient, because in the Hellenic world itself
the most varied metrical and monetary systems subsisted side by side;
it was necessary, and formed part doubtless of Caesar's plan,
now to introduce everywhere in the new united empire, so far as
this had not been done already, Roman money, Roman measures,
and Roman weights in such a manner that they alone should be reckoned
by in official intercourse, and that the non-Roman systems
should be restricted to local currency or placed in a--once for all
regulated--ratio to the Roman.(111)  The action of Caesar,
however, can only be pointed out in two of the most important
of these departments, the monetary system and the calendar.

Gold Coin as Imperial Currency

The Roman monetary system was based on the two precious metals
circulating side by side and in a fixed relation to each other,
gold being given and taken according to weight,(112) silver
in the form of coin; but practically in consequence of the extensive
transmarine intercourse the gold far preponderated over the silver.
Whether the acceptance of Roman silver money was not even
at an earlier period obligatory throughout the empire, is uncertain;
at any rate uncoined gold essentially supplied the place of imperial
money throughout the Roman territory, the more so as the Romans
had prohibited the coining of gold in all the provinces and client-
states, and the -denarius- had, in addition to Italy, de jure
or de facto naturalized itself in Cisalpine Gaul, in Sicily,
in Spain and various other places, especially in the west.(113)
 but the imperial coinage begins with Caesar.  Exactly like Alexander,
he  marked the foundation of the new monarchy embracing the civilized
world by the fact that the only metal forming an universal medium
obtained the first place in the coinage.  The greatness of the scale
on which the new Caesarian gold piece (20 shillings 7 pence
according to the present value of the metal) was immediately coined,
is shown by the fact that in a single treasure buried seven years
after Caesar's death 80,000 of these pieces were found together.
It is true that financial speculations may have exercised
a collateral influence in this respect.(114) as to the silver money,
the exclusive rule of the Roman -denarius- in all the west,
for which the foundation had previously been laid, was finally
established by Caesar, when he definitively closed the only
Occidental mint that still competed in silver currency with the Roman,
that of Massilia.  The coining of silver or copper small money
was still permitted to a number of Occidental communities;
three-quarter -denarii- were struck by some Latin communities
of southern Gaul, half -denarii- by several cantons in northern Gaul,
copper small coins in various instances even after Caesar's time
by communes of the west; but this small money was throughout coined
after the Roman standard, and its acceptance moreover was probably
obligatory only in local dealings.  Caesar does not seem any more
than the earlier government to have contemplated the regulation
with a view to unity of the monetary system of the east,
where great masses of coarse silver money--much of which too easily
admitted of being debased or worn away--and to some extent even,
as in Egypt, a copper coinage akin to our paper money
were in circulation, and the Syrian commercial cities would have felt
very severely the want of their previous national coinage corresponding
to the Mesopotamian currency.  We find here subsequently
the arrangement that the -denarius- has everywhere legal currency
and is the only medium of official reckoning,(115) while the local coins
have legal currency within their limited range but according
to a tariff unfavourable for them as compared with the -denarius-.(116)
This was probably not introduced all at once, and in part perhaps
may have preceded Caesar; but it was at any rate the essential
complement of the Caesarian arrangement as to the imperial coinage,
whose new gold piece found its immediate model in the almost equally
heavy coin of Alexander and was doubtless calculated especially
for circulation in the east.

Reform of the Calendar

Of a kindred nature was the reform of the calendar.
The republican calendar, which strangely enough was still
the old decemviral calendar--an imperfect adoption of the -octaeteris-
that preceded Meton (117)--had by a combination of wretched mathematics
and wretched administration come to anticipate the true time
by 67 whole days, so that e. g. the festival of Flora was celebrated
on the 11th July instead of the 28th April.  Caesar finally removed
this evil, and with the help of the Greek mathematician Sosigenes
introduced the Italian farmer's year regulated according to the Egyptian
calendar of Eudoxus, as well as a rational system of intercalation,
into religious and official use; while at the same time
the beginning of the year on the 1st March of the old calendar
was abolished, and the date of the 1st January--fixed at first
as the official term for changing the supreme magistrates and,
in consequence of this, long since prevailing in civil life--
was assumed also as the calendar-period for commencing the year.
Both changes came into effect on the 1st January 709, and along
with them the use of the Julian calendar so named after its author,
which long after the fall of the monarchy of Caesar remained
the regulative standard of the civilized world and in the main
is so still.  By way of explanation there was added in a detailed edict
a star-calendar derived from the Egyptian astronomical observations
and transferred--not indeed very skilfully--to Italy, which fixed
the rising and setting of the stars named according to days
of the calendar.(118)  In this domain also the Roman and Greek worlds
were thus placed on a par.

Caesar and His Works

Such were the foundations of the Mediterranean monarchy of Caesar.
For the second time in Rome the social question had reached
a crisis, at which the antagonisms not only appeared to be,
but actually were, in the form of their exhibition, insoluble and,
in the form of their expression, irreconcilable.  On the former
occasion Rome had been saved by the fact that Italy was merged
in Rome and Rome in Italy, and in the new enlarged and altered home
those old antagonisms were not reconciled, but fell into abeyance.
Now Rome was once more saved by the fact that the countries
of the Mediterranean were merged in it or became prepared for merging;
the war between the Italian poor and rich, which in the old Italy
could only end with the destruction of the nation, had no longer
a battle-field or a meaning in the Italy of three continents.
The Latin colonies closed the gap which threatened to swallow up
the Roman community in the fifth century; the deeper chasm
of the seventh century was filled by the Transalpine and transmarine
colonizations of Gaius Gracchus and Caesar.  For Rome alone history
not merely performed miracles, but also repeated its miracles,
and twice cured the internal crisis, which in the state itself
was incurable, by regenerating the state.  There was doubtless
much corruption in this regeneration; as the union of Italy
was accomplished over the ruins of the Samnite and Etruscan nations,
so  the Mediterranean monarchy built itself on the ruins of countless
states and tribes once living and vigorous; but it was a corruption
out of which sprang a fresh growth, part of which remains green
at the present day.  What was pulled down for the sake of the new
building, was merely the secondary nationalities which had long since
been marked out for destruction by the levelling hand of civilization.
Caesar, wherever he came forward as a destroyer, only carried out
the pronounced verdict of historical development; but he protected
the germs of culture, where and as he found them, in his own land
as well as among the sister nation of the Hellenes.  He saved
and renewed the Roman type; and not only did he spare the Greek type,
but with the same self-relying genius with which he accomplished
the renewed foundation of Rome he undertook also the regeneration
of the Hellenes, and resumed the interrupted work of the great Alexander,
whose image, we may well believe, never was absent from Caesar's soul.
He solved these two great tasks not merely side by side,
but the one by means of the other.  The two great essentials
of humanity--general and individual development, or state and culture--
once in embryo united in those old Graeco-Italians feeding their flocks
in primeval simplicity far from the coasts and islands
of the Mediterranean, had become dissevered when these were parted
into Italians and Hellenes, and had thenceforth remained apart
for many centuries.  Now the descendant of the Trojan prince
and the Latin king's daughter created out of a state without
distinctive culture and a cosmopolitan civilization a new whole,
in which state and culture again met together at the acme
of human existence in the rich fulness of blessed maturity
and worthily filled the sphere appropriate to such an union.

The outlines have thus been set forth, which Caesar drew for this work,
according to which he laboured himself, and according to which posterity--
for many centuries confined to the paths which this great man marked out--
endeavoured to prosecute the work, if not with the intellect
and energy, yet on the whole in accordance with the intentions,
of the illustrious master.  Little was finished; much even
was merely begun.  Whether the plan was complete, those who venture
to vie in thought with such a man may decide; we observe no material
defect in what lies before us--every single stone of the building
enough to make a man immortal, and yet all combining to form
one harmonious whole.  Caesar ruled as king of Rome for five years
and a half, not half as long as Alexander; in the intervals
of seven great campaigns, which allowed him to stay not more
than fifteen months altogether(119) in the capital of his empire,
he regulated the destinies of the world for the present
and the future, from the establishment of the boundary-line
between civilization and barbarism down to the removal of the pools
of rain in the streets of the capital, and yet retained time
and composure enough attentively to follow the prize-pieces in the theatre
and to confer the chaplet on the victor with improvised verses.
The rapidity and self-precision with which the plan was executed
prove that it had been long meditated thoroughly and all its parts
settled in detail; but, even thus, they remain not much less wonderful than
the plan itself.  The outlines were laid down and thereby the new state
was defined for all coming time; the boundless future alone could complete
the structure.  So far Caesar might say, that his aim was attained;
and this was probably the meaning of the words which were sometimes
heard to fall from him--that he had "lived enough."  But precisely because
the building was an endless one, the master as long as he lived restlessly
added stone to stone, with always the same dexterity and always the same
elasticity busy at his work, without ever overturning or postponing,
just as if there were for him merely a to-day and no to-morrow.
Thus he worked and created as never did any mortal before or after him;
and as a worker and creator he still, after wellnigh two thousand years,
lives in the memory of the nations--the first, and withal unique,
Imperator Caesar.




Chapter XII

Religion, Culture, Literature, and Art

State Religion

In the development of religion and philosophy no new element
appeared during this epoch.  The Romano-Hellenic state-religion
and the Stoic state-philosophy inseparably combined with it
were for every government--oligarchy, democracy or monarchy--not merely
a convenient instrument, but quite indispensable for the very reason
that it was just as impossible to construct the state wholly without
religious elements as to discover any new state-religion fitted
to take the place of the old.  So the besom of revolution swept doubtless
at times very roughly through the cobwebs of the augural bird-lore;(1)
nevertheless the rotten machine creaking at every joint
survived the earthquake which swallowed up the republic itself,
and preserved its insipidity and its arrogance without diminution
for transference to the new monarchy.  As a matter of course,
it fell more and more into disfavour with all those who preserved
their freedom of judgment.  Towards the state-religion indeed
public opinion maintained an attitude essentially indifferent;
it was on all sides recognized as an institution of political convenience,
and no one specially troubled himself about it with the exception
of political and antiquarian literati.  But towards its philosophical
sister there gradually sprang up among the unprejudiced public
that hostility, which the empty and yet perfidious hypocrisy of set phrases
never fails in the long run to awaken.  That a presentiment of its own
worthlessness began to dawn on the Stoa itself, is shown by its attempt
artificially to infuse into itself some fresh spirit in the way
of syncretism.  Antiochus of Ascalon (flourishing about 675), who professed
to have patched together the Stoic and Platonic-Aristotelian systems
into one organic unity, in reality so far succeeded that his misshapen
doctrine became the fashionable philosophy of the conservatives
of his time and was conscientiously studied by the genteel dilettanti
and literati of Rome.  Every one who displayed any intellectual vigour,
opposed the Stoa or ignored it.  It was principally antipathy
towards the boastful and tiresome Roman Pharisees, coupled doubtless
with the increasing disposition to take refuge from practical life
in indolent apathy or empty irony, that occasioned during this epoch
the extension of the system of Epicurus to a larger circle
and the naturalization of the Cynic philosophy of Diogenes in Rome.
However stale and poor in thought the former might be, a philosophy,
which did not seek the way to wisdom through an alteration
of traditional terms but contented itself with those in existence,
and throughout recognized only the perceptions of sense as true,
was always better than the terminological jingle and the hollow
conceptions of the Stoic wisdom; and the Cynic philosophy
was of all the philosophical systems of the times in so far
by much the best, as its system was confined to the having
no system at all and sneering at all systems and all systematizers.
In both fields war was waged against the Stoa with zeal and success;
for serious men, the Epicurean Lucretius preached with the full accents
of heartfelt conviction and of holy zeal against the Stoical faith
in the gods and providence and the Stoical doctrine of the immortality
of the soul; for the great public ready to laugh, the Cynic Varro
hit the mark still more sharply with the flying darts of his extensively-
read satires.  While thus the ablest men of the older generation
made war on the Stoa, the younger generation again, such as Catullus,
stood in no inward relation to it at all, and passed a far sharper
censure on it by completely ignoring it.

The Oriental Religions

But, if in the present instance a faith no longer believed in
was maintained out of political convenience, they amply made up
for this in other respects.  Unbelief and superstition, different hues
of the same historical phenomenon, went in the Roman world
of that day hand in hand, and there was no lack of individuals
who in themselves combined both--who denied the gods with Epicurus,
and yet prayed and sacrificed before every shrine.  Of course only
the gods that came from the east were still in vogue, and, as the men
continued to flock from the Greek lands to Italy, so the gods
of the east migrated in ever-increasing numbers to the west.
The importance of the Phrygian cultus at that time in Rome is shown
both by the polemical tone of the older men such as Varro and Lucretius,
and by the poetical glorification of it in the fashionable Catullus,
which concludes with the characteristic request that the goddess
may deign to turn the heads of others only, and not that
of the poet himself.

Worship of Mithra

A fresh addition was the Persian worship, which is said
to have first reached the Occidental through the medium of the pirates
who met on the Mediterranean from the east and from the west;
the oldest seat of this cultus in the west is stated to have been
Mount Olympus in Lycia.  That in the adoption of Oriental worships
in the west such higher speculative and moral elements as they contained
were generally allowed to drop, is strikingly evinced by the fact
that Ahuramazda, the supreme god of the pure doctrine of Zarathustra,
remained virtually unknown in the west, and adoration there
was especially directed to that god who had occupied the first place
in the old Persian national religion and had been transferred
by Zarathustra to the second--the sun-god Mithra.

Worship of Isis

But the brighter and gentler celestial forms of the Persian religion
did not so rapidly gain a footing in Rome as the wearisome mystical host
of the grotesque divinities of Egypt--Isis the mother of nature
with her whole train, the constantly dying and constantly reviving
Osiris, the gloomy Sarapis, the taciturn and grave Harpocrates,
the dog-headed Anubis.  In the year when Clodius emancipated
the clubs and conventicles (696), and doubtless in consequence
of this very emancipation of the populace, that host even prepared
to make its entry into the old stronghold of the Roman Jupiter
in the Capitol, and it was with difficulty that the invasion
was prevented and the inevitable temples were banished
at least to the suburbs of Rome.  No worship was equally popular
among the lower orders of the population in the capital: when the senate
ordered the temples of Isis constructed within the ring-wall
to be pulled down, no labourer ventured to lay the first hand on them,
and the consul Lucius Paullus was himself obliged to apply
the first stroke of the axe(704); a wager might be laid,
that the more loose any woman was, the more piously she worshipped Isis.
That the casting of lots, the interpretation of dreams, and similar
liberal arts supported their professors, was a matter of course.
The casting of horoscopes was already a scientific pursuit;
Lucius Tarutius of Firmum, a respectable and in his own way learned man,
a friend of Varro and Cicero, with all gravity cast the nativity
of kings Romulus and Numa and of the city of Rome itself,
and for the edification of the credulous on either side confirmed
by means of his Chaldaean and Egyptian wisdom the accounts
of the Roman annals.

The New Pythagoreanism
Nigidius Figulus

But by far the most remarkable phenomenon in this domain
was the first attempt to mingle crude faith with speculative thought,
the first appearance of those tendencies, which we are accustomed
to describe as Neo-Platonic, in the Roman world.  Their oldest apostle
there was Publius Nigidius Figulus, a Roman of rank belonging
to the strictest section of the aristocracy, who filled
the praetorship in 696 and died in 709 as a political exile
beyond the bounds of Italy.  With astonishing copiousness of learning
and still more astonishing strength of faith he created
out of the most dissimilar elements a philosophico-religious structure,
the singular outline of which he probably developed still more
in his oral discourses than in his theological and physical writings.
In philosophy, seeking deliverance from the skeletons of the current
systems and abstractions, he recurred to the neglected fountain
of the pre-Socratic philosophy, to whose ancient sages thought
had still presented itself with sensuous vividness.  The researches
of physical science--which, suitably treated, afford even now
so excellent a handle for mystic delusion and pious sleight of hand,
and in antiquity with its more defective insight into physical laws
lent themselves still more easily to such objects--played in this case,
as may readily be conceived, a considerable part.  His theology
was based essentially on that strange medley, in which Greeks
of a kindred spirit had intermingled Orphic and other very old
or very new indigenous wisdom with Persian, Chaldaean,
and Egyptian secret doctrines, and with which Figulus incorporated
the quasi-results of the Tuscan investigation into nothingness
and of the indigenous lore touching the flight of birds,
so as to produce further harmonious confusion.  The whole system obtained
its consecration--political, religious, and national--from the name
of Pythagoras, the ultra-conservative statesman whose supreme principle
was "to promote order and to check disorder," the miracle-worker
and necromancer, the primeval sage who was a native of Italy,
who was interwoven even with the legendary history of Rome,
and whose statue was to be seen in the Roman Forum.  As birth
and death are kindred with each other, so--it seemed--Pythagoras
was to stand not merely by the cradle of the republic as friend
of the wise Numa and colleague of the sagacious mother Egeria,
but also by its grave as the last protector of the sacred bird-lore.
But the new system was not merely marvellous, it also worked marvels;
Nigidius announced to the father of the subsequent emperor Augustus,
on the very day when the latter was born, the future greatness
of his son; nay the prophets conjured up spirits for the credulous,
and, what was of more moment, they pointed out to  them the places
where their lost money lay.  The new-and-old wisdom, such as it was,
made a profound impression on its contemporaries; men of the highest rank,
of the greatest learning, of the most solid ability, belonging
to very different parties--the consul of 705, Appius Claudius,
the learned Marcus Varro, the brave officer Publius Vatinius--
took part in the citation of spirits, and it even appears
that a police interference was necessary against the proceedings
of these societies.  These last attempts to save the Roman theology,
like the kindred efforts of Cato in the field of politics, produce at once
a comical and a melancholy impression; we may smile at the creed
and its propagators, but still it is a grave matter when even able men
begin to addict themselves to absurdity.

Training of Youth
Sciences of General Culture at This Period

The training of youth followed, as may naturally be supposed,
the course of bilingual humane culture chalked out in the previous epoch,
and the general culture also of the Roman world conformed
more and more to the forms established for that purpose by the Greeks.
Even the bodily exercises advanced from ball-playing, running,
and fencing to the more artistically-developed Greek gymnastic contests;
though there were not yet any public institutions for gymnastics,
in the principal country-houses the palaestra was already to be found
by the side of the bath-rooms.  The manner in which the cycle
of general culture had changed in the Roman world during the course
of a century, is shown by a comparison of the encyclopaedia of Cato(2)
with the similar treatise of Varro "concerning the school-sciences."
As constituent elements of non-professional culture, there appear in Cato
the art of oratory, the sciences of agriculture, of law, of war,
and of medicine; in Varro--according to probable conjecture--grammar,
logic or dialectics, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy,
music, medicine, and architecture.  Consequently in the course
of the seventh century the sciences of war, jurisprudence,
and agriculture had been converted from general into professional
studies.  On the other hand in Varro the Hellenic training of youth
appears already in all its completeness: by the side of the course
of grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy, which had been introduced
at an earlier period into Italy, we now find the course which had
longer remained distinctively Hellenic, of geometry, arithmetic,
astronomy, and music.(3)  That astronomy more especially,
which ministered, in the nomenclature of the stars, to the thoughtless
erudite dilettantism of the age and, in its relations to astrology,
to the prevailing religious delusions, was regularly and zealously
studied by the youth in Italy, can be proved also otherwise;
the astronomical didactic poems of Aratus, among all the works
of Alexandrian literature, found earliest admittance into the instruction
of Roman youth.  To this Hellenic course there was added the study
of medicine, which was retained from the older Roman instruction,
and lastly that of architecture--indispensable to the genteel Roman
of this period, who instead of cultivatingthe ground built
houses and villas.

Greek Instruction
Alexandrinism

In comparison with the previous epoch the Greek as well as
the Latin training improved in extent and in scholastic strictness
quite as much as it declined in purity and in refinement.
The increasing eagerness after Greek lore gave to instruction
of itself an erudite character.  To explain Homer or Euripides
was after all no art; teachers and scholars found their account better
in handling the Alexandrian poems, which, besides, were in their spirit
far more congenial to the Roman world of that day than the genuine Greek
national poetry, and which, if they were not quite so venerable
as the Iliad, possessed at any rate an age sufficiently respectable
to pass as classics with schoolmasters.  The love-poems of Euphorion,
the "Causes" of Callimachus and his "Ibis," the comically obscure
"Alexandra" of Lycophron contained in rich abundance rare vocables
(-glossae-) suitable for being extracted and interpreted,
sentences laboriously involved and difficult of analysis,
prolix digressions full of mystic combinations of antiquated myths,
and generally a store of cumbersome erudition of all sorts.
Instruction needed exercises more and more difficult; these productions,
in great part model efforts of schoolmasters, were excellently
adapted to be lessons for model scholars.  Thus the Alexandrian poems
took a permanent place in Italian scholastic instruction,
especially as trial-themes, and certainly promoted knowledge,
although at the expense of taste and of discretion. The same unhealthy
appetite for culture moreover impelled the Roman youths to derive
their Hellenism as much as possible from the fountain-head.  The courses
of the Greek masters in Rome  sufficed only for a first start;
every one who wished to be able to converse heard lectures
on Greek philosophy at Athens, and on Greek rhetoric at Rhodes,
and made a literary and artistic tour through Asia Minor,
where most of the old art-treasures of the Hellenes were still
to be found on the spot, and the cultivation of the fine arts
had been continued, although after a mechanical fashion;
whereas Alexandria, more distant and more celebrated as the seat
of the exact sciences, was far more rarely the point whither young men
desirous of culture directed their travels.

Latin Instruction

The advance in Latin instruction was similar to that of Greek.
This in part resulted from the mere reflex influence of the Greek,
from which it in fact essentially borrowed its methods
and its stimulants.  Moreover, the relations of politics, the impulse
to mount the orators' platform in the Forum which was imparted
by the democratic doings to an ever-widening circle, contributed
not a little to the diffusion and enhancement of oratorical exercises;
"wherever one casts his eyes," says Cicero, "every place is full
of rhetoricians." Besides, the writings of the sixth century,
the farther they receded into the past, began to be more decidedly
regarded as classical texts of the golden age of Latin literature,
and thereby gave a greater preponderance to the instruction
which was essentially concentrated upon them.  Lastly the immigration
and spreading of barbarian elements from many quarters
and the incipient Latinizing of extensive Celtic and Spanish districts,
naturally gave to Latin grammar and Latin instruction a higher importance
than they could have had, so long as Latium only spoke Latin;
the teacher of Latin literature had from the outset a different
position in Comum and Narbo than he had in Praeneste and Ardea.
Taken as a whole, culture was more on the wane than on the advance.
The ruin of the Italian country towns, the extensive intrusion of foreign
elements, the political, economic, and moral deterioration of the nation,
above all, the distracting civil wars inflicted more injury
on the language than all the schoolmasters of the world could repair.
The closer contact with the Hellenic culture of the present,
the more decided influence of the talkative Athenian wisdom
and of the rhetoric of Rhodes and Asia Minor, supplied
to the Roman youth just the very elements that were most pernicious
in Hellenism.  The propagandist mission which Latium undertook
among the Celts, Iberians, and Libyans--proud as the task was--
could not but have the like consequences for the Latin language
as the Hellenizing of the east had had for the Hellenic.
The fact that the Roman public of this period applauded
the well arranged and rhythmically balanced periods of the orator,
and any offence in language or metre cost the actor dear, doubtless
shows that the insight into the mother tongue which was the reflection
of scholastic training was becoming the common possession of an ever-
widening circle.  But at the same time contemporaries capable
of judging complain that the Hellenic culture in Italy about 690
was at a far lower level than it had been a generation before;
that opportunities of hearing pure and good Latin were but rare,
and these chiefly from the mouth of elderly cultivated ladies;
that the tradition of genuine culture, the good old Latin mother wit,
the Lucilian polish, the cultivated circle of readers
of the Scipionic age were gradually disappearing.  The circumstance
that the term -urbanitas-, and the idea of a polished national culture
which it expressed, arose during this period, proves, not that
it was prevalent, but that it was on the wane, and that people
were keenly alive to the absence of this -urbanitas- in the language
and the habits of the Latinized barbarians or barbarized Latins.
Where we still meet with the urbane tone of conversation, as in Varro's
Satires and Cicero's Letters, it is an echo of the old fashion
which was not yet so obsolete in Reate and Arpinum as in Rome.

Germs of State Training-Schools

Thus the previous culture of youth remained substantially unchanged,
except that--not so much from its own deterioration as
from the general decline of the nation--it was productive of less good
and more evil than in the preceding epoch.  Caesar initiated
a revolution also in this department.  While the Roman senate
had first combated and then at the most had simply tolerated culture,
the government of the new Italo-Hellenic empire, whose essence
in fact was -humanitas-, could not but adopt measures to stimulate it
after the Hellenic fashion.  If Caesar conferred the Roman franchise
on all teachers of the liberal sciences and all the physicians
of the capital, we may discover in this step a paving of the way
in some degree for those institutions in which subsequently
the higher bilingual culture of the youth of the empire
was provided for on the part of the state, and which form
the most significant expression of the new state of -humanitas-;
and if Caesar had further resolved on the establishment
of a public Greek and Latin library in the capital and had already
nominated the most learned Roman of the age, Marcus Varro,
as principal librarian, this implied unmistakeably the design
of connecting the cosmopolitan monarchy with cosmopolitan literature.

Language
The Vulgarism of Asia Minor

The development of the language during this period turned
on the distinction between the classical Latin of cultivated society
and the vulgar language of common life.  The former itself
was a product of the distinctively Italian culture; even in the Scipionic
circle "pure Latin" had become the cue, and the mother tongue was spoken,
no longer in entire naivete, but in conscious contradistinction
to the language of the great multitude.  This epoch opens
with a remarkable reaction against the classicism which had hitherto
exclusively prevailed in the higher language of conversation
and accordingly also in literature--a reaction which had
inwardly and outwardly a close connection with the reaction
of a similar nature in the language of Greece.  Just about this time
the rhetor and romance-writer Hegesias of Magnesia and the numerous
rhetors and literati of Asia Minor who attached themselves to him
began to rebel against the orthodox Atticism.  They demanded
full recognition for the language of life, without distinction,
whether the word or the phrase originated in Attica or in Caria
and Phrygia; they themselves spoke and wrote not for the taste
of learned cliques, but for that of the great public.  There could not
be much objection to the principle; only, it is true, the result
could not be better than was the public of Asia Minor of that day,
which had totally lost the taste for chasteness and purity
of production, and longed only after the showy and brilliant.
To say nothing of the spurious forms of art that sprang
out of this tendency--especially the romance and the history assuming
the form of romance--the very style of these Asiatics was,
as may readily be conceived, abrupt and without modulation and finish,
minced and effeminate, full of tinsel and bombast, thoroughly vulgar
and affected; "any one who knows Hegesias," says Cicero,
"knows what silliness is."

Roman Vulgarism
Hortensius
Reaction
The Rhodian School

Yet this new style found its way also into the Latin world.
When the Hellenic fashionable rhetoric, after having at the close
of the previous epoch obtruded into the Latin instruction of youth,(4)
took at the beginning of the present period the final step and mounted
the Roman orators' platform in the person of Quintus Hortensius
(640-704), the most celebrated pleader of the Sullan age,
it adhered closely even in the Latin idiom to the bad Greek taste
of the time; and the Roman public, no longer having the pure
and chaste culture of the Scipionic age, naturally applauded
with zeal the innovator who knew how to give to vulgarism
the semblance of an artistic performance.  This was of great importance.
As in Greece the battles of language were always waged at first
in the schools of the rhetoricians, so in Rome the forensic oration
to a certain extent even more than literature set the standard of style,
and accordingly there was combined, as it were of right,
with the leadership of the bar the prerogative of giving the tone
to the fashionable mode of speaking and writing.  The Asiatic vulgarism
of Hortensius thus dislodged classicism from the Roman platform
and partly also from literature.  But the fashion soon changed
once more in Greece and in Rome.  In the former it was the Rhodian school
of rhetoricians, which, without reverting to all the chaste severity
of the Attic style, attempted to strike out a middle course between it
and the modern fashion: if the Rhodian masters were not too particular
as to the internal correctness of their thinking and speaking,
they at least insisted on purity of language and style, on the careful
selection of words and phrases, and the giving thorough effect
to the modulation of sentences.

Ciceronianism

In Italy it was Marcus Tullius Cicero (648-711) who, after having
in his early youth gone along with the Hortensian manner,
was brought by hearing the Rhodian masters and by his own
more matured taste to better paths, and thenceforth addicted himself
to strict purity of language and the thorough periodic arrangement
and modulation of his discourse.  The models of language, which,
in this respect he followed, he found especially in those circles
of the higher Roman society which had suffered but little or not at all
from vulgarism; and, as was already said, there were still such,
although they were beginning to disappear.  The earlier Latin
and the good Greek literature, however considerable was the influence
of the latter more especially on the rhythm of his oratory,
were in this matter only of secondary moment: this purifying
of the language was by no means a reaction of the language of books
against that of conversation, but a reaction of the language
of the really cultivated against the jargon of spurious
and partial culture.  Caesar, in the department of language
also the greatest master of his time, expressed the fundamental idea
of Roman classicism, when he enjoined that in speech and writing
every foreign word should be avoided, as rocks are avoided
by the mariner; the poetical and the obsolete word of the older
literature was rejected as well as the rustic phrase or that borrowed
from the language of common life, and more especially the Greek words
and phrases which, as the letters of this period show,
had to a very great extent found their way into conversational language.
Nevertheless this scholastic and artificial classicism
of the Ciceronian period stood to the Scipionic as repentance
to innocence, or the French of the classicists under Napoleon
to the model French of Moliere and Boileau; while the former classicism
had sprung out of the full freshness of life, the latter as it were
caught just in right time the last breath of a race perishing
beyond recovery.  Such as it was, it rapidly diffused itself.
With the leadership of the bar the dictatorship of language and taste
passed from Hortensius to Cicero, and the varied and copious
authorship of the latter gave to this classicism--what it had
hitherto lacked--extensive prose texts.  Thus Cicero became
the creator of the modern classical Latin prose, and Roman classicism
attached itself throughout and altogether to Cicero as a stylist;
it was to the stylist Cicero, not to the author, still less
to the statesman, that the panegyrics--extravagant yet not made up
wholly of verbiage--applied, with which the most gifted representatives
of classicism, such as Caesar and Catullus, loaded him.

The New Roman Poetry

They soon went farther.  What Cicero did in prose, was carried out
in poetry towards the end of the epoch by the new Roman school
of poets, which modelled itself on the Greek fashionable poetry,
and in which the man of most considerable talent was Catullus.
Here too the higher language of conversation dislodged the archaic
reminiscences which hitherto to a large extent prevailed
in this domain, and as Latin prose submitted to the Attic rhythm,
so Latin poetry submitted gradually to the strict or rather painful
metrical laws of the Alexandrines; e. g. from the time of Catullus,
it is no longer allowable at once to begin a verse and to close
a sentence begun in the verse preceding with a monosyllabic word
or a dissyllabic one not specially weighty.

Grammatical Science

At length science stepped in, fixed the law of language,
and developed its rule, which was no longer determined on the basis
of experience, but made the claim to determine experience.
The endings of declension, which hitherto had in part been variable,
were now to be once for all fixed; e. g. of the genitive and dative
forms hitherto current side by side in the so-called fourth declension
(-senatuis- and -senatus-, -senatui-, and -senatu-) Caesar recognized
exclusively as valid the contracted forms (-us and -u).
In orthography various changes were made, to bring the written
more fully into correspondence with the spoken language;
thus the -u in the middle of words like -maxumus- was replaced
after Caesar's precedent by -i; and of the two letters
which had become superfluous, -k and -q, the removal of the first
was effected, and that of the second was at least proposed.
The language was, if not yet stereotyped, in the course of becoming so;
it was not yet indeed unthinkingly dominated by rule, but it had already
become conscious of it.  That this action in the department
of Latin grammar derived generally its spirit and method
from the Greek, and not only so, but that the Latin language was also
directly rectified in accordance with Greek precedent, is shown,
for example, by the treatment of the final -s, which till
towards the close of this epoch had at pleasure passed sometimes
as a consonant, sometimes not as one, but was treated by the new-
fashioned poets throughout, as in Greek, as a consonantal
termination.  This regulation of language is the proper domain
of Roman classicism; in the most various ways, and for that very reason
all the more significantly, the rule is inculcated and the offence
against it rebuked by the coryphaei of classicism, by Cicero,
by Caesar, even in the poems of Catullus; whereas the older generation
expresses itself with natural keenness of feeling respecting
the revolution which had affected the field of language
as remorselessly as the field of politics.(5)  But while the new
classicism--that is to say, the standard Latin governed by rule
and as far as possible placed on a parity with the standard Greek--
which arose out of a conscious reaction against the vulgarism
intruding into higher society and even into literature,
acquired literary fixity and systematic shape, the latter by no means
evacuated the field.  Not only do we find it naively employed
in the works of secondary personages who have drifted into the ranks
of authors merely by accident, as in the account of Caesar's second
Spanish war, but we shall meet it also with an impress more or less
distinct in literature proper, in the mime, in the semi-romance,
in the aesthetic writings of Varro; and it is a significant
circumstance, that it maintains itself precisely in the most national
departments of literature, and that truly conservative men,
like Varro, take it into protection.  Classicism was based
on the death of the Italian language as monarchy on the decline
of the Italian nation; it was completely consistent that the men,
in whom the republic was still living, should continue to give
to the living language its rights, and for the sake of its comparative
vitality and nationality should tolerate its aesthetic defects.
Thus then the linguistic opinions and tendencies of this epoch
are everywhere divergent; by the side of the old-fashioned poetry
of Lucretius appears the thoroughly modern poetry of Catullus,
by the side of Cicero's well-modulated period stands the sentence
of Varro intentionally disdaining all subdivision.  In this field
likewise is mirrored the distraction of the age.

Literary Effort
Greek Literati in Rome

In the literature of this period we are first of all struck
by the outward increase, as compared with the former epoch,
of literary effort in Rome.  It was long since the literary activity
of the Greeks flourished no more in the free atmosphere
of civic independence, but only in the scientific institutions
of the larger cities and especially of the courts.  Left to depend
on the favour and protection of the great, and dislodged
from the former seats of the Muses(6) by the extinction
of the dynasties of Pergamus (621), Cyrene (658), Bithynia (679),
and Syria (690) and by the waning splendour of the court
of the Lagids--moreover, since the death of Alexander the Great,
necessarily cosmopolitan and at least quite as much strangers
among the Egyptians and Syrians as among the Latins--
the Hellenic literati began more and more to turn their eyes
towards Rome.  Among the host of Greek attendants with which
the Roman of quality at this time surrounded himself, the philosopher,
the poet, and the memoir-writer played conspicuous parts
by the side of the cook, the boy-favourite, and the jester.
We meet already literati of note in such positions; the Epicurean
Philodemus, for instance, was installed as domestic philosopher
with Lucius Piso consul in 696, and occasionally edified the initiated
with his clever epigrams on the coarse-grained Epicureanism
of his patron.  From all sides the most notable representatives
of Greek art and science migrated in daily-increasing numbers to Rome
where literary gains were now more abundant than anywhere else.
Among those thus mentioned as settled in Rome we find the physician
Asclepiades whom king Mithradates vainly endeavoured to draw away from it
into his service; the universalist in learning, Alexander of Miletus,
termed Polyhistor; the poet Parthenius from Nicaea in Bithynia;
Posidonius of Apamea in Syria equally celebrated as a traveller,
teacher, and author, who at a great age migrated in 703 from Rhodes
to Rome; and various others.  A house like that of Lucius Lucullus
was a seat of Hellenic culture and a rendezvous for Hellenic literati
almost like the Alexandrian Museum; Roman resources and Hellenic
connoisseurship had gathered in these halls of wealth and science
an incomparable collection of statues and paintings of earlier
and contemporary masters, as well as a library as carefully selected
as it was magnificently fitted up, and every person of culture
and especially every Greek was welcome there--the master of the house
himself was often seen walking up and down the beautiful colonnade
in philological or philosophical conversation with one of his
learned guests.  No doubt these Greeks brought along with their
rich treasures of culture their preposterousness and servility
to Italy; one of these learned wanderers for instance, the author
of the "Art of Flattery," Aristodemus of Nysa (about 700)
recommended himself to his masters by demonstrating that Homer
was a native of Rome!

Extent of the Literary Pursuits of the Romans

In the same measure as the pursuits of the Greek literati prospered
in Rome, literary activity and literary interest increased among
the Romans themselves.  Even Greek composition, which the stricter
taste of the Scipionic age had totally set aside, now revived.
The Greek language was now universally current, and a Greek treatise
found a quite different public from a Latin one; therefore Romans
of rank, such as Lucius Lucullus, Marcus Cicero, Titus Atticus,
Quintus Scaevola (tribune of the people in 700), like the kings
of Armenia and Mauretania, published occasionally Greek prose
and even Greek verses.  Such Greek authorship however by native Romans
remained a secondary matter and almost an amusement; the literary
as well as the political parties of Italy all coincided in adhering
to their Italian nationality, only more or less pervaded
by Hellenism.  Nor could there be any complaint at least as to want
of activity in the field of Latin authorship.  There was a flood
of books and pamphlets of all sorts, and above all of poems, in Rome.
Poets swarmed there, as they did only in Tarsus or Alexandria;
poetical publications had become the standing juvenile sin
of livelier natures, and even then the writer was reckoned fortunate
whose youthful poems compassionate oblivion withdrew from criticism.
Any one who understood the art, wrote without difficulty
at a sitting his five hundred hexameters in which no schoolmaster
found anything to censure, but no reader discovered anything to praise.
The female world also took a lively part in these literary pursuits;
the ladies did not confine themselves to dancing and music,
but by their spirit and wit ruled conversation and talked excellently
on Greek and Latin literature; and, when poetry laid siege
to a maiden's heart, the beleaguered fortress not seldom surrendered
likewise in graceful verses.  Rhythms became more and more
the fashionable plaything of the big children of both sexes;
poetical epistles, joint poetical exercises and competitions
among good friends, were of common occurrence, and towards the end
of this epoch institutions were already opened in the capital,
at which unfledged Latin poets might learn verse-making for money.
In consequence of the large consumption of books the machinery
for the manufacture of copies was substantially perfected,
and publication was effected with comparative rapidity and cheapness;
bookselling became a respectable and lucrative trade, and the bookseller's
shop a usual meeting-place of men of culture.  Reading had become
a fashion, nay a mania; at table, where coarser pastimes had not
already intruded, reading was regularly introduced, and any one
who meditated a journey seldom forgot to pack up a travelling library.
The superior officer was seen in the camp-tent with the obscene
Greek romance, the statesman in the senate with the philosophical
treatise, in his hands.  Matters accordingly stood in the Roman state
as they have stood and will stand in every state where the citizens
read "from the threshold to the closet."  The Parthian vizier
was not far wrong, when he pointed out to the citizens of Seleucia
the romances found in the camp of Crassus and asked them whether
they still regarded the readers of such books as formidable opponents.

The Classicists and the Moderns

The literary tendency of this age was varied and could not be otherwise,
for the age itself was divided between the old and the new modes.
The same tendencies which came into conflict on the field of politics,
the national-Italian tendency of the conservatives, the Helleno-Italian
or, if the term be preferred, cosmopolitan tendency of the new monarchy,
fought their battles also on the field of literature.  The former
attached itself to the older Latin literature, which in the theatre,
in the school, and in erudite research assumed more and more
the character of classical.  With less taste and stronger party
tendencies than the Scipionic epoch showed, Ennius, Pacuvius,
and especially Plautus were now exalted to the skies.  The leaves
of the Sibyl rose in price, the fewer they became; the relatively
greater nationality and relatively greater productiveness of the poets
of the sixth century were never more vividly felt than in this epoch
of thoroughly developed Epigonism, which in literature as decidedly
as in politics looked up to the century of the Hannibalic warriors
as to the golden age that had now unhappily passed away beyond recall.
No doubt there was in this admiration of the old classics no small portion
of the same hollowness and hypocrisy which are characteristic
of the conservatism of this age in general; and here too
there was no want of trimmers.  Cicero for instance, although in prose
one of the chief representatives of the modern tendency,
revered nevertheless the older national poetry nearly with the same
antiquarian respect which he paid to the aristocratic constitution
and the augural discipline; "patriotism requires," we find him saying,
"that we should rather read a notoriously wretched translation
of Sophocles than the original."  While thus the modern literary tendency
cognate to the democratic monarchy numbered secret adherents enough even
among the orthodox admirers of Ennius, there were not wanting already
bolder judges, who treated the native literature as disrespectfully
as the senatorial politics.  Not only did they resume the strict
criticism of the Scipionic epoch and set store by Terence only in order
to condemn Ennius and still more the Ennianists, but the younger
and bolder men went much farther and ventured already--though only as yet
in heretical revolt against literary orthodoxy--to call Plautus
a rude jester and Lucilius a bad verse-smith.  This modern tendency
attached itself not to the native authorship, but rather
to the more recent Greek literature or the so-called Alexandrinism.

The Greek Alexandrinism

We cannot avoid saying at least so much respecting
this remarkable winter-garden of Hellenic language and art,
as is requisite for the understanding of the Roman literature
of this and the later epochs.  The Alexandrian literature was based
on the decline of the pure Hellenic idiom, which from the time
of Alexander the Great was superseded in daily life by an inferior
jargon deriving its origin from the contact of the Macedonian dialect
with various Greek and barbarian tribes; or, to speak more accurately,
the Alexandrian literature sprang out of the ruin of the Hellenic nation
generally, which had to perish, and did perish, in its national
individuality in order to establish the universal monarchy of Alexander
and the empire of Hellenism.  Had Alexander's universal empire continued
to subsist, the former national and popular literature would have been
succeeded by a cosmopolitan literature Hellenic merely in name,
essentially denationalized and called into life in a certain measure
by royal patronage, but at all events ruling the world;
but, as the state of Alexander was unhinged by his death,
the germs of the literature corresponding to it rapidly perished.
Nevertheless the Greek nation with all that it had possessed--
with its nationality, its language, its art--belonged to the past.
It was only in a comparatively narrow circle not of men of culture--
for such, strictly speaking, no longer existed--but of men of erudition
that the Greek literature was still cherished even when dead;
that the rich inheritance which it had left was inventoried
with melancholy pleasure or arid refinement of research; and that,
possibly, the living sense of sympathy or the dead erudition
was elevated into a semblance of productiveness.  This posthumous
productiveness constitutes the so-called Alexandrinism.
It is essentially similar to that literature of scholars, which,
keeping aloof from the living Romanic nationalities and their vulgar
idioms, grew up during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
among a cosmopolitan circle of erudite philologues--as an artificial
aftergrowth of the departed antiquity; the contrast between
the classical and the vulgar Greek of the period of the Diadochi
is doubtless less strongly marked, but is not, properly speaking,
different from that between the Latin of Manutius
and the Italian of Macchiavelli.

The Roman Alexandrinism

Italy had hitherto been in the main disinclined towards Alexandrinism.
Its season of comparative brilliance was the period shortly before
and after the first Punic war; yet Naevius, Ennius, Pacuvius
and generally the whole body of the national Roman authors
down to Varro and Lucretius in all branches of poetical production,
not excepting even the didactic poem, attached themselves,
not to their Greek contemporaries or very recent predecessors,
but without exception to Homer, Euripides, Menander and the other masters
of the living and national Greek literature.  Roman literature
was never fresh and national; but, as long as there was a Roman people,
its authors instinctively sought for living and national models,
and copied, if not always to the best purpose or the best authors,
at least such as were original.  The Greek literature originating
after Aexander found its first Roman imitators--for the slight
initial attempts from the Marian age(7) can scarcely be taken
into account--among the contemporaries of Cicero and Caesar;
and now the Roman Alexandrinism spread with singular rapidity.
In part this arose from external causes.  The increased contact
with the Greeks, especially the frequent journeys of the Romans
into the Hellenic provinces and the assemblage of Greek literati
in Rome, naturally procured a public even among the Italians
for the Greek literature of the day, for the epic and elegiac poetry,
epigrams, and Milesian tales current at that time in Greece.  Moreover,
as we have already stated(8) the Alexandrian poetry had its established
place in the instruction of the Italian youth; and thus reacted
on Latin literature all the more, since the latter continued to be
essentially dependent at all times on the Hellenic school-training.
We find in this respect even a direct connection of the new Roman
with the new Greek literature; the already-mentioned Parthenius,
one of the better known Alexandrian elegists, opened, apparently
about 700, a school for literature and poetry in Rome, and the excerpts
are still extant in which he supplied one of his  pupils of rank
with materials for Latin elegies of an erotic and mythological
nature according to the well-known Alexandrian receipt.
But it was by no means simply such accidental occasions which called
into existence the Roman Alexandrinism; it was on the contrary
a product--perhaps not pleasing, but thoroughly inevitable--
of the political and national development of Rome.  On the one hand,
as Hellas resolved itself into Hellenism, so now Latium
resolved itself into Romanism; the national development of Italy
outgrew itself, and was merged in Caesar's Mediterranean empire,
just as the Hellenic development in the eastern empire of Alexander.
On the other hand, as the new empire rested on the fact
that the mighty streams of Greek and Latin nationality, after having
flowed in parallel channels for many centuries, now at length coalesced,
the Italian literature had not merely as hitherto to seek
its groundwork generally in the Greek, but had also to put itself
on a level with the Greek literature of the present, or in other words
with Alexandrinism.  With the scholastic Latin, with the closed number
of classics, with the exclusive circle of classic-reading -urbani-,
the national Latin literature was dead and at an end; there arose
instead of it a thoroughly degenerate, artificially fostered,
imperial literature, which did not rest on any definite nationality,
but proclaimed in two languages the universal gospel of humanity,
and was dependent in point of spirit throughout and consciously
on the old Hellenic, in point of language partly on this,
partly on the old Roman popular, literature.  This was no improvement.
The Mediterranean monarchy of Caesar was doubtless a grand and--
what is more--a necessary creation; but it had been called
into life by an arbitrary superior will, and therefore
there was nothing to be found in it of the fresh popular life,
of the overflowing national vigour, which are characteristic of younger,
more limited, and more natural commonwealths, and which the Italian
state of the sixth century had still been able to exhibit.
The ruin of the Italian nationality, accomplished in the creation
of Caesar, nipped the promise of literature.  Every one who has
any sense of the close affinity between art and nationality
will always turn back from Cicero and Horace to Cato and Lucretius;
and nothing but the schoolmaster's view of history and of literature--
which has acquired, it is true, in this department the sanction
of prescription--could have called the epoch of art beginning
with the new monarchy pre-eminently the golden age.  But while
the Romano-Hellenic Alexandrinism of the age of Caesar and Augustus
must be deemed inferior to the older, however imperfect, national
literature, it is on the other hand as decidedly superior
to the Alexandrinism of the age of the Diadochi as Caesar's enduring
structure to the ephemeral creation of Alexander.  We shall have
afterwards to show that the Augustan literature, compared with
the kindred literature of the period of the Diadochi, was far less
a literature of philologues and far more an imperial literature
than the latter, and therefore had a far more permanent
and far more general influence in the upper circles of society
than the Greek Alexandrinism ever had.

Dramatic Literature
Tragedy and Comedy Disappear

Nowhere was the prospect more lamentable than in dramatic literature.
Tragedy and comedy had already before the present epoch
become inwardly extinct in the Roman national literature.
New pieces were no longer performed.  That the public still
in the Sullan age expected to see such, appears from the reproductions--
belonging to this epoch--of Plautine comedies with the titles
and names of the persons altered, with reference to which
the managers well added that it was better to see a good old piece
than a bad new one.  From this the step was not great to that entire
surrender of the stage to the dead poets, which we find
in the Ciceronian age, and to which Alexandrinism made no opposition.
Its productiveness in this department was worse than none.
Real dramatic composition the Alexandrian literature never knew;
nothing but the spurious drama, which was written primarily for reading
and not for exhibition, could be introduced by it into Italy, and soon
accordingly these dramatic iambics began to be quite as prevalent
in Rome as in Alexandria, and the writing of tragedy in particular
began to figure among the regular diseases of adolescence.
We may form a pretty accurate idea of the quality of these productions
from the fact that Quintus Cicero, in order homoeopathically
to beguile the weariness of winter quarters in Gaul,
composed four tragedies in sixteen days.

The Mime
Laberius

In the "picture of life" or mime alone the last still vigorous
product of the national literature, the Atellan farce,
became engrafted with the ethological offshoots of Greek comedy,
which Alexandrinism cultivated with greater poetical vigour
and better success than any other branch of poetry.  The mime originated
out of the dances in character to the flute, which had long been usual,
and which were performed sometimes on other occasions, e. g.
for the entertainment of the guests during dinner, but more especially
in the pit of the theatre during the intervals between the acts.
It was not difficult to form out of these dances--in which the aid
of speech had doubtless long since been occasionally employed--
by means of the introduction of a more organized plot and a regular
dialogue little comedies, which were yet essentially distinguished
from the earlier comedy and even from the farce by the facts,
that the dance and the lasciviousness inseparable from such dancing
continued in this case to play a chief part, and that the mime,
as belonging properly not to the boards but to the pit, threw aside
all ideal scenic effects, such as masks for the face and theatrical
buskins, and--what was specially important--admitted of the female
characters being represented by women.  This new mime, which first
seems to have come on the stage of the capital about 672,
soon swallowed up the national harlequinade, with which it indeed
in the most essential respects coincided, and was employed
as the usual interlude and especially as afterpiece along with
the other dramatic performances.(9)  The plot was of course
still more indifferent, loose, and absurd than in the harlequinade;
if it was only sufficiently chequered, the public did not ask
why it laughed, and did not remonstrate with the poet, who instead
of untying the knot cut it to pieces.  The subjects were chiefly
of an amorous nature, mostly of the licentious sort; for example,
poet and public without exception took part against the husband,
and poetical justice consisted in the derision of good morals.
The artistic charm depended wholly, as in the Atellana,
on the portraiture of the manners of common and low life;
in which rural pictures are laid aside for those of the life
and doings of the capital, and the sweet rabble of Rome--
just as in the similar Greek pieces the rabble of Alexandria--
is summoned to applaud its own likeness.  Many subjects
are taken from the life of tradesmen; there appear the--
here also inevitable--"Fuller," then the "Ropemaker," the "Dyer,"
the "Salt-man," the "Female Weavers," the "Rascal"; other pieces
give sketches of character, as the "Forgetful," the "Braggart,"
the "Man of 100,000 sesterces";(10) or pictures of other lands,
the "Etruscan Woman," the "Gauls," the "Cretan," "Alexandria";
or descriptions of popular festivals, as the "Compitalia,"
the "Saturnalia," "Anna Perenna," the "Hot Baths"; or parodies
of mythology, as the "Voyage to the Underworld," the "Arvernian Lake."
Apt nicknames and short commonplaces which were easily retained
and applied were welcome; but every piece of nonsense
was of itself privileged; in this preposterous world Bacchus
is applied to for water and the fountain-nymph for wine.
Isolated examples even of the political allusions formerly
so strictly prohibited in the Roman theatre are found in these mimes.(11)
As regards metrical form, these poets gave themselves, as they tell us,
"but moderate trouble with the versification"; the language abounded,
even in the pieces prepared for publication, with vulgar expressions
and low newly-coined words.  The mime was, it is plain,
in substance nothing but the former farce; with this exception,
that the character-masks and the standing scenery of Atella
as well as the rustic impress are dropped, and in their room
the life of the capital in its boundless liberty and licence
is brought on the stage.  Most pieces of this sort were doubtless
of a very fugitive nature and made no pretension to a place
in literature; but the mimes of Laberius, full of pungent
delineation of character and in point of language and metre
exhibiting the hand of a master, maintained their ground in it;
and even the historian must regret that we are no longer permitted
to compare the drama of the republican death-struggle in Rome
with its great Attic counterpart.

Dramatic Spectacles

With the worthlessness of dramatic literature the increase
of scenic spectacles and of scenic pomp went hand in hand.
Dramatic representations obtained their regular place in the public life
not only of the capital but also of the country towns; the former
also now at length acquired by means of Pompeius a permanent theatre
(699;(12)), and the Campanian custom of stretching canvas
over the theatre for the protection of the actors and spectators
during the performance, which in ancient times always took place
in the open air, now likewise found admission to Rome (676).
As at that time in Greece it was not the--more than pale-Pleiad
of the Alexandrian dramatists, but the classic drama, above all
the tragedies of Euripides, which amidst the amplest development
of scenic resources kept the stage, so in Rome at the time of Cicero
the tragedies of Ennius, Pacuvius, and Accius, and the comedies
of Plautus were those chiefly produced.  While the latter had been
in the previous period supplanted by the more tasteful but in point
of comic vigour far inferior Terence, Roscius and Varro,
or in other words the theatre and philology, co-operated to procure
for him a resurrection similar to that which Shakespeare experienced
at the hands of Garrick and Johnson; but even Plautus had to suffer
from the degenerate susceptibility and the impatient haste
of an audience spoilt by the short and slovenly farces, so that
the managers found themselves compelled to excuse the length
of the Plautine comedies and even perhaps to make omissions
and alterations.  The more limited the stock of plays, the more
the activity of the managing and executive staff as well as
the interest of the public was directed to the scenic representation
of the pieces.  There was hardly any more lucrative trade in Rome
than that of the actor and the dancing-girl of the first rank.
The princely estate of the tragic actor Aesopus has been
already mentioned;(13) his still more celebrated contemporary
Roscius(14) estimated his annual income at 600,000 sesterces
(6000 pounds)(15) and Dionysia the dancer estimated hers
at 200,000 sesterces (2000 pounds).  At the same time
immense sums were expended on decorations and costume;
now and then trains of six hundred mules in harness crossed
the stage, and the Trojan theatrical army was employed
to present to the public a tableau of the nations vanquished
by Pompeius in Asia.  The music which accompanied the delivery
of the inserted choruses likewise obtained a greater
and more independent importance; as the wind sways the waves,
says Varro, so the skilful flute-player sways the minds of the listeners
with every modulation of melody.  It accustomed itself to the use
of quicker time, and thereby compelled the player to more lively action.
Musical and dramatic connoisseurship was developed; the -habitue-
recognized every tune by the first note, and knew the texts
by heart; every fault in the music or recitation was severely
censured by the audience.  The state of the Roman stage in the time
of Cicero vividly reminds us of the modern French theatre.
As the Roman mime corresponds to the loose tableaux of the pieces
of the day, nothing being too good and nothing too bad for either
the one or the other, so we find in both the same traditionally
classic tragedy and comedy, which the man of culture is in duty bound
to admire or at least to applaud.  The multitude is satisfied,
when it meets its own reflection in the farce, and admires
the decorative pomp and receives the general impression of an ideal world
in the drama; the man of higher culture concerns himself at the theatre
not with the piece, but only with its artistic representation.
Moreover the Roman histrionic art oscillated in its different spheres,
just like the French, between the cottage and the drawing-room.
It was nothing unusual for the Roman dancing-girls to throw off
at the finale the upper robe and to give a dance in undress
for the benefit of the public; but on the other hand in the eyes
of the Roman Talma the supreme law of his art was, not the truth
of nature, but symmetry.

Metrical Annals

In recitative poetry metrical annals after the model of those
of Ennius seem not to have been wanting; but they were perhaps
sufficiently criticised by that graceful vow of his mistress
of which Catullus sings--that the worst of the bad heroic poems
should be presented as a sacrifice to holy Venus, if she would only
bring back her lover from his vile political poetry to her arms.

Lucretius

Indeed in the whole field of recitative poetry at this epoch
the older national-Roman tendency is represented only by a single work
of note, which, however, is altogether one of the most important
poetical products of Roman literature.  It is the didactic poem
of Titus Lucretius Carus (655-699) "Concerning the Nature of Things,"
whose author, belonging to the best circles of Roman society,
but taking no part in public life whether from weakness of health
or from disinclination, died in the prime of manhood shortly before
the outbreak of the civil war.  As a poet he attached himself
decidedly to Ennius and thereby to the classical Greek literature.
Indignantly he turns away from the "hollow Hellenism" of his time,
and professes himself with his whole soul and heart to be the scholar
of the "chaste Greeks," as indeed even the sacred earnestness
of Thucydides has found no unworthy echo in one of the best-known
sections of this Roman poem.  As Ennius draws his wisdom
from Epicharmus and Euhemerus, so Lucretius borrows the form
of his representation from Empedocles, "the most glorious
treasure of the richly gifted Sicilian isle"; and, as to the matter,
gathers "all the golden words together from the rolls of Epicurus,"
"who outshines other wise men as the sun obscures the stars."
Like Ennius, Lucretius disdains the mythological lore with which
poetry was overloaded by Alexandrinism, and requires nothing
from his reader but a knowledge of the legends generally current.(16)
In spite of the modern purism which rejected foreign words from poetry,
Lucretius prefers to use, as Ennius had done, a significant Greek word
in place of a feeble and obscure Latin one.  The old Roman alliteration,
the want of due correspondence between the pauses of the verse and those
of the sentence, and generally the older modes of expression
and composition, are still frequently found in Lucretius' rhythms,
and although he handles the verse more melodiously than Ennius,
his hexameters move not, as those of the modern poetical school,
with a lively grace like the rippling brook, but with a stately slowness
like the stream of liquid gold.  Philosophically and practically
also Lucretius leans throughout on Ennius, the only indigenous poet
whom his poem celebrates.  The confession of faith of the singer
of Rudiae(17)--

   -Ego deum genus esse semper dixi et dicam caelitum,
   Sed eos non curare opinor, quid agat humanum genus-:--

describes completely the religious standpoint of Lucretius,
and not unjustly for that reason he himself terms his poem
as it were the continuation of Ennius:--

   -Ennius ut noster cecinit, qui primus amoeno
   Detulit ex Helicone perenni fronde coronam,
   Per gentis Italas hominum quae clara clueret-.

Once more--and for the last time--the poem of Lucretius is resonant
with the whole poetic pride and the whole poetic earnestness
of the sixth century, in which, amidst the images of the formidable
Carthaginian and the glorious Scipiad, the imagination of the poet
is more at home than in his own degenerate age.(18)  To him too
his own song "gracefully welling up out of rich feeling" sounds,
as compared with the common poems, "like the brief song of the swan
compared with the cry of the crane";--with him too the heart swells,
listening to the melodies of its own invention, with the hope
of illustrious honours--just as Ennius forbids the men to whom
he "gave from the depth of the heart a foretaste of fiery song,"
to mourn at his, the immortal singer's, tomb.

It is a remarkable fatality, that this man of extraordinary talents,
far superior in originality of poetic endowments to most
if not to all his contemporaries, fell upon an age in which
he felt himself strange and forlorn, and in consequence of this
made the most singular mistake in the selection of a subject.  The system
of Epicurus, which converts the universe into a great vortex of atoms
and undertakes to explain the origin and end of the world as well as
all the problems of nature and of life in a purely mechanical way,
was doubtless somewhat less silly than the conversion of myths
into history which was attempted by Euhemerus and after him by Ennius;
but it was not an ingenious or a fresh system, and the task
of poetically unfolding this mechanical view of the world
was of such a nature that never probably did poet expend life
and art on a more ungrateful theme.  The philosophic reader censures
in the Lucretian didactic poem the omission of the finer points
of the system, the superficiality especially with which controversies
are presented, the defective division, the frequent repetitions,
with quite as good reason as the poetical reader frets
at the mathematics put into rhythm which makes a great part
of the poem absolutely unreadable. In spite of these incredible defects,
before which every man of mediocre talent must inevitably have succumbed,
this poet might justly boast of having carried off from the poetic
wilderness a new chaplet such as the Muses had not yet bestowed on any;
and it was by no means merely the occasional similitudes,
and the other inserted descriptions of mighty natural phenomena
and yet mightier passions, which acquired for the poet this chaplet.
The genius which marks the view of life as well as the poetry
of Lucretius depends on his unbelief, which came forward
and was entitled to come forward with the full victorious power
of truth, and therefore with the full vigour of poetry, in opposition
to the prevailing hypocrisy or superstition.

   -Humana ante oculos foede cum vita iaceret
   In terris oppressa gravi sub religione,
   Quae caput a caeli regionibus ostendebat
   Horribili super aspectu mortalibus instans,
   Primum Graius homo mortalis tendere contra
   Est oculos ausus primusque obsistere contra.
   Ergo vivida vis animi pervicit, et extra
   Processit longe flammantia moenia mundi
   Atque omne immensum peragravit mente animoque-.

The poet accordingly was zealous to overthrow the gods,
as Brutus had overthrown the kings, and "to release nature
from her stern lords."  But it was not against the long ago enfeebled
throne of Jovis that these flaming words were hurled; just like Ennius,
Lucretius fights practically above all things against the wild
foreign faiths and superstitions of, the multitude, the worship
of the Great Mother for instance and the childish lightning-lore
of the Etruscans.  Horror and antipathy towards that terrible world
in general, in which and for which the poet wrote, suggested his poem.
It was composed in that hopeless time when the rule of the oligarchy
had been overthrown and that of Caesar had not yet  been established,
in the sultry years during which the outbreak of the civil war
was awaited with long and painful suspense.  If we  seem to perceive
in its unequal and restless utterance that the poet daily
expected to see the wild tumult of revolution break forth
over himself and his work, we must not with reference to his view
of men and things forget amidst what men, and in prospect
of what things, that view had its origin.  In the Hellas of the epoch
before Alexander it was a current saying, and one profoundly felt
by all the best men, that the best thing of all was not to be born,
and the next best to die.  Of all views of the world possible
to a tender and poetically organized mind in the kindred Caesarian age
this was the noblest and the most ennobling, that it is a benefit
for man to be released from a belief in the immortality of the soul
and thereby from the evil dread of death and of the gods
which malignantly steals over men like terror creeping over children
in a dark room; that, as the sleep of the night is more refreshing
than the trouble of the day, so death, eternal repose
from all hope and fear, is better than life, as indeed the gods
of the poet themselves are nothing, and have nothing, but an eternal
blessed rest; that the pains of hell torment man, not after life,
but during its course, in the wild and unruly passions
of his throbbing heart; that the task of man is to attune his soul
to equanimity, to esteem the purple no higher than the warm dress
worn at home, rather to remain in the ranks of those that obey
than to press into the confused crowd of candidates for the office
of ruler, rather to lie on the grass beside the brook than to take part
under the golden ceiling of the rich in emptying his countless dishes.
This philosophico-practical tendency is the true ideal essence
of the Lucretian poem and is only overlaid, not choked,
by all the dreariness of its physical demonstrations.  Essentially
on this rests its comparative wisdom and truth.  The man who
with a reverence for his great predecessors and a vehement zeal,
to which this century elsewhere knew no parallel, preached such doctrine
and embellished it with the charm of art, may be termed at once
a good citizen and a great poet.  The didactic poem concerning
the Nature of Things, however much in it may challenge censure,
has remained one of the most brilliant stars in the poorly illuminated
expanse of Roman literature; and with reason the greatest of German
philologues chose the task of making the Lucretian poem
once more readable as his last and most masterly work.

The Hellenic Fashionable Poetry

Lucretius, although his poetical vigour as well as his art was admired
by his cultivated contemporaries, yet remained--of late growth
as he was--a master without scholars.  In the Hellenic fashionable
poetry on the other hand there was no lack at least of scholars,
who exerted themselves to emulate the Alexandrian masters.
With true tact the more gifted of the Alexandrian poets
avoided larger works and the pure forms of poetry--the drama,
the epos, the lyric; the most pleasing and successful performances
consisted with them, just as with the new Latin poets, in "short-
winded" tasks, and especially in such as belonged to the domains
bordering on the pure forms of art, more especially to the wide field
intervening between narrative and song.  Multifarious didactic
poems were written.  Small half-heroic, half-erotic epics
were great favourites, and especially an erudite sort of love-elegy
peculiar to this autumnal summer of Greek poetry and characteristic
of the philological source whence it sprang, in which the poet
more or less arbitrarily interwove the description of his own feelings,
predominantly sensuous, with epic shreds from the cycle of Greek legend.
Festal lays were diligently and artfully manufactured; in general,
owing to the want of spontaneous poetical invention, the occasional poem
preponderated and especially the epigram, of which the Alexandrians
produced excellent specimens.  The poverty of materials and the want
of freshness in language and rhythm, which inevitably cleave
to every literature not national, men sought as much as possible
to conceal under odd themes, far-fetched phrases, rare words,
and artificial versification, and generally under the whole apparatus
of philologico-antiquarian erudition and technical dexterity.
Such was the gospel which was preached to the Roman boys of this period,
and they came in crowds to hear and to practise it; already (about 700)
the love-poems of Euphorion and similar Alexandrian poetry formed
the ordinary reading and the ordinary pieces for declamation
of the cultivated youth.(19)  The literary revolution took place;
but it yielded in the first instance with rare exceptions only premature
or unripe fruits.  The number of the "new-fashioned poets" was legion,
but poetry was rare and Apollo was compelled, as always when so many
throng towards Parnassus, to make very short work.  The long poems never
were worth anything, the short ones seldom.  Even in this literary age
the poetry of the day had become a public nuisance; it sometimes
happened that one's friend would send home to him by way of mockery
as a festal present a pile of trashy verses fresh from the bookseller's
shop, whose value was at once betrayed by the elegant binding
and the smooth paper.  A real public, in the sense in which national
literature has a public, was wanting to the Roman Alexandrians
as well as to the Hellenic; it was thoroughly the poetry of a clique
or rather cliques, whose members clung closely together,
abused intruders, read and criticised among themselves the new poems,
sometimes also quite after the Alexandrian fashion celebrated
the successful productions in fresh verses, and variously sought
to secure for themselves by clique-praises a spurious and ephemeral
renown.  A notable teacher of Latin literature, himself poetically
active in this new direction, Valerius Cato appears to have exercised
a sort of scholastic patronage over the most distinguished men
of this circle and to have pronounced final decision on the relative
value of the poems.  As compared with their Greek models,
these Roman poets evince throughout a want of freedom,
sometimes a schoolboy dependence; most of their products
must have been simply the austere fruits of a school poetry
still occupied in learning and by no means yet dismissed as mature.
Inasmuch as in language and in measure they adhered to the Greek patterns
far more closely than ever the national Latin poetry had done,
a greater correctness and consistency in language and metre
were certainly attained; but it was at the expense of the flexibility
and fulness of the national idiom.  As respects the subject-matter,
under the influence partly of effeminate models, partly
of an immoral age, amatory themes acquired a surprising preponderance
little conducive to poetry; but the favourite metrical compendia
of the Greeks were also in various cases translated, such as
the astronomical treatise of Aratus by Cicero, and, either at the end
of this or more probably at the commencement of the following period,
the geographical manual of Eratosthenes by Publius Varro of the Aude
and the physico-medicinal manual of Nicander by Aemilius Macer.
It is neither to be wondered at nor regretted that of this countless
host of poets but few names have been preserved to us;
and even these are mostly mentioned merely as curiosities
or as once upon a time great; such as the orator Quintus Hortensius
with his "five hundred thousand lines" of tiresome obscenity,
and the somewhat more frequently mentioned Laevius, whose -Erotopaegnia-
attracted a certain interest only by their complicated measures
and affected phraseology.  Even the small epic Smyrna by Gaius
Helvius Cinna (d. 710?), much as it was praised by the clique,
bears both in its subject--the incestuous love of a daughter
for her father--and in the nine years' toil bestowed on it the worst
characteristics of the time.

Catullus

Those poets alone of this school constitute an original
and pleasing exception, who knew how to combine with its neatness
and its versatility of form the national elements of worth still existing
in the republican life, especially in that of the country-towns.
To say nothing here of Laberius and Varro, this description
applies especially to the three poets already mentioned above(20)
of the republican opposition, Marcus Furius Libaculus (652-691),
Gaius Licinius Calvus (672-706) and Quintus Valerius Catullus
(667-c. 700).  Of the two former, whose writings have perished,
we can indeed only conjecture this; respecting the poems of Catullus
we can still form a judgment.  He too depends in subject and form
on the Alexandrians.  We find in his collection translations of pieces
of Callimachus, and these not altogether the very good,
but the very difficult.  Among the original pieces, we meet
with elaborately-turned fashionable poems, such as the over-artificial
Galliambics in praise of the Phrygian Mother; and even the poem,
otherwise so beautiful, of the marriage of Thetis has been
artistically spoiled by the truly Alexandrian insertion
of the complaint of Ariadne in the principal poem.  But by the side
of these school-pieces we meet with the melodious lament
of the genuine elegy, the festal poem in the full pomp of individual
and almost dramatic execution, above all, the freshest miniature painting
of cultivated social life, the pleasant and very unreserved
amatory adventures of which half the charm consists in prattling
and poetizing about the mysteries of love, the delightful life
of youth with full cups and empty purses, the pleasures
of travel and of poetry, the Roman and still more frequently
the Veronese anecdote of the town, and the humorous jest
amidst the familiar circle of friends.  But not only does Apollo
touch the lyre of the poet, he wields also the bow; the winged dart
of sarcasm spares neither the tedious verse-maker nor the provincial
who corrupts the language, but it hits none more frequently
and more sharply than the potentates by whom the liberty of the people
is endangered.  The short-lined and merry metres, often enlivened
by a graceful refrain, are of finished art and yet free
from the repulsive smoothness of the manufactory.  These poems lead us
alternately to the valleys of the Nile and the Po; but the poet
is incomparably more at home in the latter.  His poems are based
on Alexandrian art doubtless, but at the same time on the self-
consciousness of a burgess and a burgess in fact of a rural town,
on the contrast of Verona with Rome, on the contrast of the homely
municipal with the high-born lords of the senate who usually
maltreat their humble friends--as that contrast was probably felt
more vividly than anywhere else in Catullus' home, the flourishing
and comparatively vigorous Cisalpine Gaul.  The most beautiful
of his poems reflect the sweet pictures of the Lago di Garda,
and hardly at this time could any man of the capital have written
a poem like the deeply pathetic one on his brother's death,
or the excellent genuinely homely festal hymn for the marriage of Manlius
and Aurunculeia.  Catullus, although dependent on the Alexandrian masters
and standing in the midst of the fashionable and clique poetry
of that age, was yet not merely a good scholar among many mediocre
and bad ones, but himself as much superior to his masters
as the burgess of a free Italian community was superior
to the cosmopolitan Hellenic man of letters.  Eminent creative vigour
indeed and high poetic intentions we may not look for in him;
he is a richly gifted and graceful but not a great poet, and his poems
are, as he himself calls them, nothing but "pleasantries
and trifles." Yet when we find not merely his contemporaries
electrified by these fugitive songs, but the art-critics
of the Augustan age also characterizing him along with Lucretius
as the most important poet of this epoch, his contemporaries
as well as their successors were completely right.  The Latin nation
has produced no second poet in whom the artistic substance
and the artistic form appear in so symmetrical perfection
as in Catullus; and in this sense the collection of the poems of Catullus
is certainly the most perfect which Latin poetry as a whole can show.

Poems in Prose
Romances

Lastly, poetry in a prose form begins in this epoch.  The law
of genuine naive as well as conscious art, which had hitherto remained
unchangeable--that the poetical subject-matter and the metrical setting
should go together--gave way before the intermixture and disturbance
of all kinds and forms of art, which is one of the most significant
features of this period.  As to romances indeed nothing farther
is to be noticed, than that the most famous historian of this epoch,
Sisenna, did not esteem himself too good to translate into Latin
the much-read Milesian tales of Aristides--licentious fashionable novels
of the most stupid sort.

Varro's Aesthetic Writings

A more original and more pleasing phenomenon in this debateable
border-land between poetry and prose was the aesthetic writings
of Varro, who was not merely the most important representative
of Latin philologico-historical research, but one of the most fertile
and most interesting authors in belles-lettres.  Descended
from a plebeian gens which had its home in the Sabine land
but had belonged for the last two hundred years to the Roman senate,
strictly reared in antique discipline and decorum,(21) and already
at the beginning of this epoch a man of maturity, Marcus Terentius Varro
of Reate (638-727) belonged in politics, as a matter of course,
to the institutional party, and bore an honourable and energetic
part in its doings and sufferings.  He supported it, partly
in literature--as when he combated the first coalition,
the "three-headed monster," in pamphlets; partly in more serious
warfare, where we found him in the army of Pompeius as commandant
of Further Spain.(22)  When the cause of the republic was lost,
Varro was destined by his conqueror to be librarian of the library
which was to be formed in the capital.  The troubles
of the following period drew the old man once more into their vortex,
and it was not till seventeen years after Caesar's death,
in the eighty-ninth year of his well-occupied life, that death
called him away.

Varros' Models

The aesthetic writings, which have made him a name,
were brief essays, some in simple prose and of graver contents,
others humorous sketches the prose groundwork of which was inlaid
with various poetical effusions.  The former were the "philosophico-
historical dissertations" (-logistorici-), the latter the Menippean
Satires.  In neither case did he follow Latin models,
and the -Satura- of Varro in particular was by no means based
on that of Lucilius.  In fact the Roman -Satura- in general
was not properly a fixed species of art, but only indicated negatively
the fact that the "multifarious poem" was not to be included
under any of the recognized forms of art; and accordingly the -Satura-
poetry assumed in the hands of every gifted poet a different and peculiar
character.  It was rather in the pre-Alexandrian Greek philosophy
that Varro found the models for his more severe as well as
for his lighter aesthetic works; for the graver dissertations,
in the dialogues of Heraclides of Heraclea on the Black Sea
(d. about 450), for the satires, in the writings of Menippus of Gadara
in Syria (flourishing about 475).  The choice was significant.
Heraclides, stimulated as an author by Plato's philosophic
dialogues, had amidst the brilliance of their form totally
lost sight of the scientific contents and made the poetico-fabulistic
dress the main matter; he was an agreeable and largely-read author,
but far from a philosopher.  Menippus was quite as little
a philosopher, but the most genuine literary representative
of that philosophy whose wisdom consisted in denying philosophy
and ridiculing philosophers the cynical wisdom of Diogenes;
a comic teacher of serious wisdom, he proved by examples
and merry sayings that except an upright life everything is vain
in earth and heaven, and nothing more vain than the disputes
of so-called sages.  These were the true models for Varro,
a man full of old Roman indignation at the pitiful times and full
of old Roman humour, by no means destitute withal of plastic talent
but as to everything which presented the appearance not of palpable fact
but of idea or even of system, utterly stupid, and perhaps
the most unphilosophical among the unphilosophical Romans.(23)
But Varro was no slavish pupil.  The impulse and in general
the form he derived from Heraclides and Menippus; but his was a nature
too individual and too decidedly Roman not to keep his imitative
creations essentially independent and national.

Varro's Philosophico-Historical Essays

For his grave dissertations, in which a moral maxim
or other subject of general interest is handled, he disdained,
in his framework to approximate to the Milesian tales, as Heraclides
had done, and so to serve up to the reader even childish little stories
like those of Abaris and of the maiden reawakened to life
after being seven days dead.  But seldom he borrowed the dress
from the nobler myths of the Greeks, as in the essay "Orestes
or concerning Madness"; history ordinarily afforded him a worthier
frame for his subjects, more especially the contemporary history
of his country, so that these essays became, as they were called
-laudationes- of esteemed Romans, above all of the Coryphaei
of the constitutional party.  Thus the dissertation "concerning Peace"
was at the same time a memorial of Metellus Pius, the last
in the brilliant series of successful generals of the senate;
that "concerning the Worship of the Gods" was at the same time
destined to preserve the memory of the highly-respected
Optimate and Pontifex Gaius Curio; the essay "on Fate" was connected
with Marius, that "on the Writing of History" with Sisenna
the first historian of this epoch, that "on the Beginnings
of the Roman Stage" with the princely giver of scenic spectacles
Scaurus, that "on Numbers" with the highly-cultured
Roman banker Atticus.  The two philosophico-historical essays
"Laelius or concerning Friendship," "Cato or concerning Old Age,"
which Cicero wrote probably after the model of those of Varro,
may give us some approximate idea of Varro's half-didactic,
half-narrative, treatment of these subjects.

Varros' Menippean Satires

The Menippean satire was handled by Varro with equal originality
of form and contents; the bold mixture of prose and verse is foreign
to the Greek original, and the whole intellectual contents
are pervaded by Roman idiosyncrasy--one might say, by a savour
of the Sabine soil.  These satires like the philosophico-historical
essays handle some moral or other theme adapted to the larger public,
as is shown by the several titles---Columnae Herculis-, --peri doxeis--;
--Euren ei Lopas to Poma, peri gegameikoton--, -Est Modus
Matulae-, --peri metheis--; -Papiapapae-, --peri egkomios--.
The plastic dress, which in this case might not be wanting,
is of course but seldom borrowed from the history of his native country,
as in the satire -Serranus-, --peri archairesion--.  The Cynic-
world of Diogenes on the other hand plays, as might be expected,
a great part; we meet with the --Kounistor--, the --Kounorreiton--,
the 'Ippokouon, the --'Oudrokouon--, the --Kounodidaskalikon--
and others of a like kind.  Mythology is also laid under contribution
for comic purposes; we find a -Prometheus Liber-, an -Ajax
Stramenticius-, a -Hercules Socraticus-, a -Sesqueulixes-
who had spent not merely ten but fifteen years in wanderings.
The outline of the dramatic or romantic framework is still discoverable
from the fragments in some pieces, such as the -Prometheus Liber-,
the -Sexagessis-, -Manius-; it appears that Varro frequently,
perhaps regularly, narrated the tale as his own experience;
e. g. in the -Manius- the dramatis personae go to Varro and discourse
to him "because he was known to them as a maker of books."
as to the poetical value of this dress we are no longer allowed
to form any certain judgment; there still occur in our fragments
several very charming sketches full of wit and liveliness--
thus in the -Prometheus Liber- the hero after the loosing
of his chains opens a manufactory of men, in which Goldshoe the rich
(-Chrysosandalos-) bespeaks for himself a maiden, of milk and finest wax,
such as the Milesian bees gather from various flowers, a maiden
without bones and sinews, without skin or hair, pure and polished, slim,
smooth, tender, charming.  The life-breath of this poetry is polemics--
not so much the political warfare of party, such as Lucilius
and Catullus practised, but the general moral antagonism of the stern
elderly man to the unbridled and perverse youth, of the scholar
living in the midst of his classics to the loose and slovenly,
or at any rate in point of tendency reprobate, modern poetry,(24)
of the good burgess of the ancient type to the new Rome in which
the Forum, to use Varro's language, was a pigsty and Numa, if he turned
his eyes towards his city, would see no longer a trace of his wise
regulations.  In the constitutional struggle Varro did what seemed to him
the duty of a citizen; but his heart was not in such party-doings--
"why," he complains on one occasion, "do ye call me
from my pure life into the filth of your senate-house?"  He belonged
to the good old time, when the talk savoured of onions and garlic,
but the heart was sound.  His polemic against the hereditary foes
of the genuine Roman spirit, the Greek philosophers, was only
a single aspect of this old-fashioned opposition to the spirit
of the new times; but it resulted both from the nature of the Cynical
philosophy and from the temperament of Varro, that the Menippean lash
was very specially plied round the cars of the philosophers
and put them accordingly into proportional alarm--it was not
without palpitation that the philosophic scribes of the time
transmitted to the "severe man" their newly-issued treatises.
Philosophizing is truly no art.  With the tenth part of the trouble
with which a master rears his slave to be a professional baker,
he  trains himself to be a philosopher; no doubt, when the baker
and the philosopher both come under the hammer, the artist of pastry
goes off a hundred times dearer than the sage.  Singular people,
these philosophers! One enjoins that corpses be buried in honey--
it is a fortunate circumstance that his desire is not complied with,
otherwise where would any honey-wine be left?  Another thinks
that men grow out of the earth like cresses.  A third has invented
a world-borer (--Kosmotorounei--) by which the earth will some
day be destroyed.

   -Postremo, nemo aegrotus quicquam somniat
   Tam infandum, quod non aliquis dicat philosophus-.

It is ludicrous to observe how a Long-beard--by which is meant
an etymologizing Stoic--cautiously weighs every word in goldsmith's
scales; but there is nothing that surpasses the genuine
philosophers' quarrel--a Stoic boxing-match far excels any encounter
of athletes.  In the satire -Marcopolis-, --peri archeis--,
when Marcus created for himself a Cloud-Cuckoo-Home after his own heart,
matters fared, just as in the Attic comedy, well with the peasant,
but ill with the philosopher; the -Celer- -- -di'-enos- -leimmatos-logos--,
son of Antipater the Stoic, beats in the skull of his opponent--
evidently the philosophic -Dilemma---with the mattock.

With this morally polemic tendency and this talent for embodying it
in caustic and picturesque expression, which, as the dress of dialogue
given to the books on Husbandry written in his eightieth year shows,
never forsook him down to extreme old age, Varro most happily
combined an incomparable knowledge of the national manners
and language, which is embodied in the philological writings
of his old age after the manner of a commonplace-book, but displays
itself in his Satires in all its direct fulness and freshness.
Varro was in the best and fullest sense of the term a local antiquarian,
who from the personal observation of many years knew his nation
in its former idiosyncrasy and seclusion as well as in its modern state
of transition and dispersion, and had supplemented and deepened
his direct knowledge of the national manners and national language
by the most comprehensive research in historical and literary archives.
His partial deficiency in rational judgment and learning--
in our sense of the words--was compensated for by his clear
intuition and the poetry which lived within him.  He sought
neither after antiquarian notices nor after rare antiquated
or poetical words;(25) but he was himself an old and old-fashioned man
and almost a rustic, the classics of his nation were his favourite
and long-familiar companions; how could it fail that many details
of the manners of his forefathers, which he loved above all
and especially knew, should be narrated in his writings, and that
his discourse should abound with proverbial Greek and Latin phrases,
with good old words preserved in the Sabine conversational language,
with reminiscences of Ennius, Lucilius, and above all of Plautus?
We should not judge as to the prose style of these aesthetic
writings of Varro's earlier period by the standard of his work
on Language written in his old age and probably published
in an unfinished state, in which certainly the clauses
of the sentence are arranged on the thread of the relative
like thrushes on a string; but we have already observed that Varro
rejected on principle the effort after a chaste style and Attic periods,
and his aesthetic essays, while destitute of the mean bombast
and the spurious tinsel of vulgarism, were yet written after an unclassic
and even slovenly fashion, in sentences rather directly joined
on to each other than regularly subdivided.  The poetical pieces
inserted on the other hand show not merely that their author
knew how to mould the most varied measures with as much mastery
as any of the fashionable poets, but that he had a right
to include himself among those to whom a god has granted the gift
of "banishing cares from the heart by song and sacred poesy."(26)
the sketches of Varro no more created a school than the didactic poem
of Lucretius; to the more general causes which prevented this
there falls to be added their thoroughly individual stamp,
which was inseparable from the greater age, from the rusticity,
and even from the peculiar erudition of their author.  But the grace
and humour of the Menippean satires above all, which seem to have been
in number and importance far superior to Varro's graver works,
captivated his contemporaries as well as those in after times
who had any relish for originality and national spirit; and even we,
who are no longer permitted to read them, may still from the fragments
preserved discern in some measure that the writer  "knew how to laugh
and how to jest in moderation." And as the last breath
of the good spirit of the old burgess-times ere it departed,
as the latest fresh growth which the national Latin poetry put forth,
the Satires of Varro deserved that the poet in his poetical testament
should commend these his Menippean children to every one
"who had at heart the prosperity of Rome and of Latium";
and they accordingly retain an honourable place in the literature
as in the history of the Italian people.(27)

Historical Composition
Sisenna

The critical writing of history, after the manner in which
the Attic authors wrote the national history in their classic period
and in which Polybius wrote the history of the world, was never
properly developed in Rome.  Even in the field most adapted for it--
the representation of contemporary and of recently past events--
there was nothing, on the whole, but more or less inadequate attempts;
in the epoch especially from Sulla to Caesar the not very important
contributions, which the previous epoch had to show in this field--
the labours of Antipater and Asellius--were barely even equalled.
The only work of note belonging to this field, which arose
in the present epoch, was the history of the Social and Civil Wars
by Lucius Cornelius Sisenna (praetor in 676).  Those who had read it
testify that it far excelled in liveliness and readableness
the old dry chronicles, but was written withal in a style
thoroughly impure and even degenerating into puerility; as indeed
the few remaining fragments exhibit a paltry painting of horrible
details,(28) and a number of words newly coined or derived
from the language of conversation.  When it is added that the author's
model and, so to speak, the only Greek historian familiar to him
was Clitarchus, the author of a biography of Alexander the Great
oscillating between history and fiction in the manner of the semi-
romance which bears the name of Curtius, we shall not hesitate
to recognize in Sisenna's celebrated historical work, not a product
of genuine historical criticism and art, but the first Roman essay
in that hybrid mixture of history and romance so much a favourite
with the Greeks, which desires to make the groundwork of facts
life-like and interesting by means of fictitious details and thereby
makes it insipid and untrue; and it will no longer excite surprise
that we meet with the same Sisenna also as translator of Greek
fashionable romances.(29)

Annals of the City

That the prospect should be still more lamentable in the field
of the general annals of the city and even of the world, was implied
in the nature of the case.  The increasing activity of antiquarian
research induced the expectation that the current narrative
would be rectified from documents and other trustworthy sources;
but this hope was not fulfilled.  The more and the deeper men
investigated, the more clearly it became apparent what a task it was
to write a critical history of Rome.  The difficulties even,
which opposed themselves to investigation and narration, were immense;
but the most dangerous obstacles were not those of a literary kind.
The conventional early history of Rome, as it had now been narrated
and believed for at least ten generations; was most intimately mixed up
with the civil life of the nation; and yet in any thorough
and honest inquiry not only had details to be modified here and there,
but the whole building had to be overturned as much as
the Franconian primitive history of king Pharamund or the British
of king Arthur.  An inquirer of conservative views, such as was Varro
for instance, could have no wish to put his hand to such a work;
and if a daring freethinker had undertaken it, an outcry
would have been raised by all good citizens against this worst
of all revolutionaries, who was preparing to deprive the constitutional
party even of their past Thus philological and antiquarian research
deterred from the writing of history rather than conduced towards it.
Varro and the more sagacious men in general evidently gave up
the task of annals as hopeless; at the most they arranged,
as did Titus Pomponius Atticus, the official and gentile lists
in unpretending tabular shape--a work by which the synchronistic
Graeco-Roman chronology was finally brought into the shape in which
it was conventionally fixed for posterity.  But the manufacture
of city-chronicles of course did not suspend its activity;
it continued to supply its contributions both in prose and verse
to the great library written by ennui for ennui, while the makers
of the books, in part already freedmen, did not trouble themselves
at all about research properly so called.  Such of these writings
as are mentioned to us--not one of them is preserved--seem to have been
not only of a wholly secondary character, but in great part
even pervaded by interested falsification.  It is true
that the chronicle of Quintus Claudius Quadrigarius (about 676?)
was written in an old-fashioned but good style, and studied at least
a commendable brevity in the representation of the fabulous period.
Gaius Licinius Macer (d. as late praetor in 688), father of the poet
Calvus,(30) and a zealous democrat, laid claim more than
any other chronicler to documentary research and criticism,
but his -libri lintei- and other matters peculiar to him are
in the highest degree suspicious, and an interpolation
of the whole annals in the interest of democratic tendencies--
an interpolation of a very extensive kind, and which has passed over
in part to the later annalists--is probably traceable to him.

Valerius Antias

Lastly, Valerius Antias excelled all his predecessors in prolixity
as well as in puerile story-telling.  The falsification of numbers
was here systematically carried out down even to contemporary history,
and the primitive history of Rome was elaborated once more
from one form of insipidity to another; for instance the narrative
of the way in which the wise Numa according to the instructions
of the nymph Egeria caught the gods Faunus and Picus; with wine,
and the beautiful conversation thereupon held by the same Numa
with the god Jupiter, cannot be too urgently recommended
to all worshippers of the so-called legendary history of Rome
in order that, if  possible, they may believe these things--of course,
in substance.  It would have been a marvel if the Greek novel-writers
of this period had allowed such materials, made as if for their use,
to escape them.  In fact there were not wanting Greek literati,
who worked up the Roman history into romances; such a composition,
for instance, was the Five Books "Concerning Rome" of the Alexander
Polyhistor already mentioned among the Greek literati living in Rome,(31)
a preposterous mixture of vapid historical tradition and trivial,
principally erotic, fiction.  He, it may be presumed,
took the first steps towards filling up the five hundred years,
which were wanting to bring the destruction of Troy and the origin
of Rome into the chronological connection required by the fables
on either side, with one of those lists of kings without achievements
which are unhappily familiar to the Egyptian and Greek chroniclers;
for, to all appearance, it was he that launched into the world
the kings Aventinus and Tiberinus and the Alban gens of the Silvii,
whom the following times accordingly did not neglect to furnish
in detail with name, period of reigning, and, for the sake of greater
definiteness, also a portrait.

Thus from various sides the historical romance of the Greeks
finds its way into Roman historiography; and it is more than probable
that not the least portion of what we are accustomed nowadays
to call tradition of the Roman primitive times proceeds from sources
of the stamp of Amadis of Gaul and the chivalrous romances
of Fouque--an edifying consideration, at least for those who have
a relish for the humour of history and who know how to appreciate
the comical aspect of the piety still cherished in certain circles
of the nineteenth century for king Numa.

Universal History
Nepos

A novelty in the Roman literature of this period is the appearance
of universal history or, to speak more correctly, of Roman
and Greek history conjoined, alongside of the native annals.
Cornelius Nepos from Ticinum (c. 650-c. 725) first supplied
an universal chronicle (published before 700) and a general collection
of biographies--arranged according to certain categories--of Romans
and Greeks distinguished in politics or literature or of men
at any rate who exercised influence on the Roman or Greek history.
These works are of a kindred nature with the universal histories
which the Greeks had for a considerable time been composing;
and these very Greek world-chronicles, such as that of Kastor son-in-law
of the Galatian king Deiotarus, concluded in 698, now began to include
in their range the Roman history which previously they had neglected.
These works certainly attempted, just like Polybius, to substitute
the history of the Mediterranean world for the more local one;
but that which in Polybius was the result of a grand and clear
conception and deep historical feeling was in these chronicles
rather the product of the practical exigencies of school
and self-instruction.  These general chronicles, text-books
for scholastic instruction or manuals for reference, and the whole
literature therewith connected which subsequently became very copious
in the Latin language also, can hardly be reckoned as belonging
to artistic historical composition; and Nepos himself in particular
was a pure compiler distinguished neither by spirit nor even merely
by symmetrical plan.

The historiography of this period is certainly remarkable
and in a high degree characteristic, but it is as far from pleasing
as the age itself.  The interpenetration of Greek and Latin literature
is in no field so clearly apparent as in that of history;
here the respective literatures become earliest equalized in matter
and form, and the conception of Helleno-Italic history as an unity,
in which Polybius was so far in advance of his age, was now learned
even by Greek and Roman boys at school.  But while the Mediterranean
state had found a historian before it had become conscious
of its own existence, now, when that consciousness had been attained,
there did not arise either among the Greeks or among the Romans
any man who was able to give to it adequate expression.
"There is no such thing," says Cicero, "as Roman historical
composition"; and, so far as we can judge, this is no more than
the simple truth.  The man of research turns away from writing history,
the writer of history turns away from research; historical literature
oscillates between the schoolbook and the romance.  All the species
of pure art--epos, drama, lyric poetry, history--are worthless
in this worthless world; but in no species is the intellectual decay
of the Ciceronian age reflected with so terrible a clearness
as in its historiography.

Literature Subsidiary to History
Caesar's Report

The minor historical literature of this period displays
on the other hand, amidst many insignificant and forgotten productions,
one treatise of the first rank--the Memoirs of Caesar, or rather
the Military Report of the democratic general to the people
from whom he had received his commission.  The finished section,
and that which alone was published by the author himself, describing
the Celtic campaigns down to 702, is evidently designed to justify
as well as possible before the public the formally unconstitutional
enterprise of Caesar in conquering a great country and constantly
increasing his army for that object without instructions
from the competent authority; it was written and given forth in 703,
when the storm broke out against Caesar in Rome and he was summoned
to dismiss his army and answer for his conduct.(32)  The author
of this vindication writes, as he himself says, entirely as an officer
and carefully avoids extending his military report to the hazardous
departments of political organization and administration.
His incidental and partisan treatise cast in the form of a military
report is itself a piece of history like the bulletins of Napoleon,
but it is not, and was not intended to be, a historical work
in the true sense of the word; the objective form which the narrative
assumes is that of the magistrate, not that of the historian.
But in this modest character the work is masterly and finished,
more than any other in all Roman literature.  The narrative
is always terse and never scanty, always simple and never careless,
always of transparent vividness and never strained or affected.
The language is completely pure from archaisms and from vulgarisms--
the type of the modern -urbanitas-.  In the Books concerning
the Civil War we seem to feel that the author had desired to avoid war
and could not avoid it, and perhaps also that in Caesar's soul,
as in every other, the period of hope was a purer and fresher one
than that of fulfilment; but over the treatise on the Gallic war
there is diffused a bright serenity, a simple charm, which are
no less unique in literature than Caesar is in history.

Correspondence

Of a kindred nature were the letters interchanged between the statesmen
and literati of this period, which were carefully collected
and published in the following epoch; such as the correspondence
of Caesar himself, of Cicero, Calvus and others.  They can still less
be numbered among strictly literary performances; but this literature
of correspondence was a rich store-house for historical
as for all other research, and the most faithful mirror of an epoch
in which so much of the worth of past times and so much spirit,
cleverness, and talent were evaporated and dissipated in trifling.

News-Sheet

A journalist literature in the modern sense was never formed in Rome;
literary warfare continued to be confined to the writing
of pamphlets and, along with this, to the custom generally diffused
at that time of annotating the notices destined for the public
in places of resort with the pencil or the pen.  On the other hand
subordinate persons were employed to note down the events
of the day and news of the city for the absent men of quality;
and Caesar as early as his first consulship took fitting measures
for the immediate publication of an extract from the transactions
of the senate.  From the private journals of those Roman penny-a-liners
and these official current reports there arose a sort of news-sheet
for the capital (-acta diurna-), in which the resume of the business
discussed before the people and in the senate, and  births, deaths,
and such like were recorded.  This became a not unimportant
source for history, but remained without proper political
as without literary significance.

Speeches
Decline of Political Oratory

To subsidiary historical literature belongs of right also
the composition of orations.  The speech, whether written down or not,
is in its nature ephemeral and does not belong to literature;
but it may, like the report and the letter, and indeed still
more readily than these, come to be included, through the significance
of the moment and the power of the mind from which it springs,
among the permanent treasures of the national literature.
Thus in Rome the records of orations of a political tenor delivered
before the burgesses or the jurymen had for long played a great part
in public life; and not only so, but the speeches of Gaius Gracchus
in particular were justly reckoned among the classical Roman writings.
But in this epoch a singular change occurred on all hands.
The composition of political speeches was on the decline like political
speaking itself.  The political speech in Rome, as generally
in the ancient polities, reached its culminating point in the discussions
before the burgesses; here the orator was not fettered, as in the senate,
by collegiate considerations and burdensome forms, nor,
as in the judicial addresses, by the interests--in themselves foreign
to politics--of the accusation and defence; here alone his heart
swelled proudly before the whole great and mighty Roman people
hanging on his lips.  But all this was now gone.  Not as though
there was any lack of orators or of the publishing of speeches
delivered before the burgesses; on the contrary political
authorship only now waxed copious, and it began to become
a standing complaint at table that the host incommoded his guests
by reading before them his latest orations.  Publius Clodius
had his speeches to the people issued as pamphlets,
just like Gaius Gracchus; but two men may do the same thing
without producing the same effect.  The more important leaders
even of the opposition, especially Caesar himself, did not often address
the burgesses, and no longer published the speeches which they delivered;
indeed they partly sought for their political fugitive writings
another form than the traditional one of -contiones-, in which respect
more especially the writings praising and censuring Cato(33)
are remarkable.  This is easily explained.  Gaius Gracchus
had addressed the burgesses; now men addressed the populace;
and as the audience, so was the speech.  No wonder that the reputable
political author shunned a dress which implied that he had directed
his words to the crowd assembled in the market-place of the capital.

Rise of A Literature of Pleadings
Cicero

While the composition of orations thus declined from its former
literary and political value in the same way as all branches
of literature which were the natural growth of the national life,
there began at the same time a singular, non-political, literature
of pleadings.  Hitherto the Romans had known nothing of the idea
that the address of an advocate as such was destined not only
for the judges and the parties, but also for the literary edification
of contemporaries and posterity; no advocate had written down
and published his pleadings, unless they were possibly at the same time
political orations and in so far were fitted to be circulated
as party writings, and this had not occurred very frequently.
Even Quintus Hortensius (640-704), the most celebrated Roman advocate
in the first years of this period, published but few speeches
and these apparently only such as were wholly or half political.
It was his successor in the leadership of the Roman bar,
Marcus Tullius Cicero (648-711) who was from the outset quite as much
author as forensic orator; he published his pleadings regularly,
even when they were not at all or but remotely connected
with politics.  This was a token, not of progress, but of an unnatural
and degenerate state of things.  Even in Athens the appearance
of non-political pleadings among the forms of literature was a sign
of debility; and it was doubly so in Rome, which did not,
like Athens, by a sort of necessity produce this malformation
from the exaggerated pursuit of rhetoric, but borrowed it
from abroad arbitrarily and in antagonism to the better traditions
of the nation.  Yet this new species of literature came rapidly
into vogue, partly because it had various points of contact
and coincidence with the earlier authorship of political orations,
partly because the unpoetic, dogmatical, rhetorizing temperament
of the Romans offered a favourable soil for the new seed, as indeed
at the present day the speeches of advocates and even a sort
of literature of law-proceedings are of some importance in Italy.

His Character

Thus oratorical authorship emancipated from politics
was naturalized in the Roman literary world by Cicero.
We have already had occasion several times to mention
this many-sided man.  As a statesman without insight, idea,
or purpose, he figured successively as democrat, as aristocrat,
and as a tool of the monarchs, and was never more than
a short-sighted egotist. Where he exhibited the semblance of action,
the questions to which his action applied had, as a rule,
just reached their solution; thus he came forward in the trial
of Verres against the senatorial courts when they were already
set aside; thus he was silent at the discussion on the Gabinian,
and acted as a champion of the Manilian, law; thus he thundered
against Catilina when his departure was already settled,
and so forth.  He was valiant in opposition to sham attacks,
and he knocked down many walls of pasteboard with a loud din;
no serious matter was ever, either in good or evil, decided by him,
and the execution of the Catilinarians in particular was far more
due to his acquiescence than to his instigation.  In a literary
point of view we have already noticed that he was the creator
of the modern Latin prose;(34) his importance rests on his mastery
of style, and it is only as a stylist that he shows confidence
in himself.  In the character of an author, on the other hand,
he stands quite as low as in that of a statesman.  He essayed
the most varied tasks, sang the great deeds of Marius
and his own petty achievements in endless hexameters,
beat Demosthenes off the field with his speeches, and Plato
with his philosophic dialogues; and time alone was wanting for him
to vanquish also Thucydides.  He was in fact so thoroughly a dabbler,
that it was pretty much a matter of indifference to what work
he applied his hand.  By nature a journalist in the worst
sense of that term--abounding, as he himself says, in words,
poor beyond all conception in ideas--there was no department
in which he could not with the help of a few books have rapidly got up
by translation or compilation a readable essay.  His correspondence
mirrors most faithfully his character.  People are in the habit
of calling it interesting and clever; and it is so, as long as
it reflects the urban or villa life of the world of quality;
but where the writer is thrown on his own resources, as in exile,
in Cilicia, and after the battle of Pharsalus, it is stale
and emptyas was ever the soul of a feuilletonist banished from his
familiar circles.  It is scarcely needful to add that such a statesman
and such a -litterateur- could not, as a man, exhibit aught else
than a thinly varnished superficiality and heart-lessness.
Must we still describe the orator?  The great author is also a great man;
and in the great orator more especially conviction or passion
flows forth with a clearer and more impetuous stream from the depths
of the breast than in the scantily-gifted many who merely count
and are nothing.  Cicero had no conviction and no passion;
he was nothing but an advocate, and not a good one.  He understood
how to set forth his narrative of the case with piquancy of anecdote,
to excite, if not the feeling, at any rate the sentimentality
of his hearers, and to enliven the dry business of legal pleading
by cleverness or witticisms mostly of a personal sort;
his better orations, though they are far from coming up to the free
gracefulness and the sure point of the most excellent compositions
of this sort, for instance the Memoirs of Beaumarchais, yet form
easy and agreeable reading.  But while the very advantages
just indicated will appear to the serious judge as advantages
of very dubious value, the absolute want of political discernment
in the orations on constitutional questions and of juristic deduction
in the forensic addresses, the egotism forgetful of its duty
and constantly losing sight of the cause while thinking
of the advocate, the dreadful barrenness of thought in the Ciceronian
orations must revolt every reader of feeling and judgment.

Ciceronianism

If there is anything wonderful in the case, it is in truth
not the orations, but the admiration which they excited.  As to Cicero
every unbiassed person will soon make up his mind: Ciceronianism
is a problem, which in fact cannot be properly solved, but can only
be resolved into that greater mystery of human nature--language
and the effect of language on the mind.  Inasmuch as the noble Latin
language, just before it perished as a national idiom, was once more
as it were comprehensively grasped by that dexterous stylist
and deposited in his copious writings, something of the power
which language exercises, and of the piety which it awakens,
was transferred to the unworthy vessel.  The Romans possessed
no great Latin prose-writer; for Caesar was, like Napoleon,
only incidentally an author.  Was it to be wondered at that,
in the absence of such an one, they should at least honour the genius
of the language in the great stylist?  And that, like Cicero himself,
Cicero's readers also should accustom themselves to ask not what,
but how he had written?  Custom and the schoolmaster then completed
what the power of language had begun.

Opposition to Ciceronianism
Calvus and His Associates

Cicero's contemporaries however were, as may readily be conceived,
far less involved in this strange idolatry than many of their successors.
The Ciceronian manner ruled no doubt throughout a generation
the Roman advocate-world, just as the far worse manner of Hortensius
had done; but the most considerable men, such as Caesar,
kept themselves always aloof from it, and among the younger
generation there arose in all men of fresh and living talent
the most decided opposition to that hybrid and feeble rhetoric.
They found Cicero's language deficient in precision and chasteness,
his jests deficient in liveliness, his arrangement deficient
in clearness and articulate division, and above all his whole eloquence
wanting in the fire which makes the orator.  Instead of the Rhodian
eclectics men began to recur to the genuine Attic orators
especially to Lysias and Demosthenes, and sought to naturalize
a more vigorous and masculine eloquence in Rome.  Representatives
of this tendency were, the solemn but stiff Marcus Junius Brutus
(669-712); the two political partisans Marcus Caelius Rufus
(672-706;(35)) and Gaius Scribonius Curio (d. 705(36);)--
both as orators full of spirit and life; Calvus well known
also as a poet (672-706), the literary coryphaeus of this younger
group of orators; and the earnest and conscientious Gaius Asinius Pollio
(678-757).  Undeniably there was more taste and more spirit
in this younger oratorical literature than in the Hortensian
and Ciceronian put together; but we are not able to judge how far,
amidst the storms of the revolution which rapidly swept away the whole
of this richly-gifted group with the single exception of Pollio,
those better germs attained development.  The time allotted to them
was but too brief.  The new monarchy began by making war on freedom
of speech, and soon wholly suppressed the political oration.
Thenceforth the subordinate species of the pure advocate-pleading
was doubtless still retained in literature; but the higher art
and literature of oratory, which thoroughly depend on political
excitement, perished with the latter of necessity and for ever.

The Artificial Dialogue Applied to the Professional Sciences
Cicero's Dialogues

Lastly there sprang up in the aesthetic literature of this period
the artistic treatment of subjects of professional science
in the form of the stylistic dialogue, which had been very extensively
in use among the Greeks and had been already employed also
in isolated cases among the Romans.(37)  Cicero especially made
various attempts at presenting rhetorical and philosophical subjects
in this form and making the professional manual a suitable book
for reading.  His chief writings are the -De Oratore- (written in 699),
to which the history of Roman eloquence (the dialogue -Brutus-,
written in 708) and other minor rhetorical essays were added
by way of supplement; and the treatise -De Republica- (written in 700),
with which the treatise -De Legibus- (written in 702?) after the model
of Plato is brought into connection.  They are no great works
of art, but undoubtedly they are the works in which the excellences
of the author are most, and his defects least, conspicuous.
The rhetorical writings are far from coming up to the didactic
chasteness of form and precision of thought of the Rhetoric
dedicated to Herennius, but they contain instead a store
of practical forensic experience and forensic anecdotes of all sorts
easily and tastefully set forth, and in fact solve the problem
of combining didactic instruction with amusement.  The treatise
-De Republica- carries out, in a singular mongrel compound of history
and philosophy, the leading idea that the existing constitution
of Rome is substantially the ideal state-organization sought for
by the philosophers; an idea indeed just as unphilosophical
as unhistorical, and besides not even peculiar to the author,
but which, as may readily be conceived, became and remained popular.
The scientific groundwork of these rhetorical and political
writings of Cicero belongs of course entirely to the Greeks,
and many of the details also, such as the grand concluding effect
in the treatise -De Republica- the Dream of Scipio, are directly
borrowed from them; yet they possess comparative originality,
inasmuch as the elaboration shows throughout Roman local colouring,
and the proud consciousness of political life, which the Roman
was certainly entitled to feel as compared with the Greeks,
makes the author even confront his Greek instructors with a certain
independence.  The form of Cicero's dialogue is doubtless neither
the genuine interrogative dialectics of the best Greek artificial
dialogue nor the genuine conversational tone of Diderot or Lessing;
but the great groups of advocates gathering around Crassus
and Antonius and of the older and younger statesmen of the Scipionic
circle furnish a lively and effective framework, fitting channels
for the introduction of historical references and anecdotes,
and convenient resting-points for the scientific discussion.
The style is quite as elaborate and polished as in the best-written
orations, and so far more pleasing than these, since the author
does not often in this field make a vain attempt at pathos.

While these rhetorical and political writings of Cicero
with a philosophic colouring are not devoid of merit, the compiler
on the other hand completely failed, when in the involuntary leisure
of the last years of his life (709-710) he applied himself
to philosophy proper, and with equal peevishness and precipitation
composed in a couple of months a philosophical library.  The receipt
was very simple.  In rude imitation of the popular writings
of Aristotle, in which the form of dialogue was employed
chiefly for the setting forth and criticising of the different
older systems, Cicero stitched together the Epicurean, Stoic,
and Syncretist writings handling the same problem, as they came
or were given to his hand, into a so-called dialogue.  And all
that he did on his own part was, to supply an introduction prefixed
to the new book from the ample collection of prefaces for future works
which he had beside him; to impart a certain popular character,
inasmuch as he interwove Roman examples and references, and sometimes
digressed to subjects irrelevant but more familiar to the writer
and the reader, such as the treatment of the deportment
of the orator in the -De Officiis-; and to exhibit that sort
of bungling, which a man of letters, who has not attained to philosophic
thinking or even to philosophic knowledge and who works rapidly
and boldly, shows in the reproduction of dialectic trains of thought.
In this way no doubt a multitude of thick tomes might very quickly
come into existence--"They are copies," wrote the author himself
to a friend who wondered at his fertility; "they give me little trouble,
for I supply only the words and these I have in abundance."
Against this nothing further could be said; but any one who seeks
classical productions in works so written can only be advised to study
in literary matters a becoming silence.

Professional Sciences.
Latin Philology
Varro

Of the sciences only a single one manifested vigorous life,
that of Latin philology.  The scheme of linguistic and antiquarian
research within the domain of the Latin race, planned by Silo,
was carried out especially by his disciple Varro on the grandest scale.
There appeared comprehensive elaborations of the whole stores
of the language, more especially the extensive grammatical commentaries
of Figulus and the great work of Varro -De Lingua Latina-;
monographs on grammar and the history of the language, such as
Varro's writings on the usage of the Latin language, on synonyms,
on the age of the letters, on the origin of the Latin tongue;
scholia on the older literature, especially on Plautus;
works of literary history, biographies of poets, investigations
into the earlier drama, into the scenic division of the comedies
of Plautus, and into their genuineness.  Latin archaeology,
which embraced the whole older history and the ritual law apart
from practical jurisprudence, was comprehended in Varro's "Antiquities
of Things Human and Divine," which was and for all times remained
the fundamental treatise on the subject (published between 687
and 709).  The first portion, "Of Things Human," described the primeval
age of Rome, the divisions of city and country, the sciences
of the years, months, and days, lastly, the public transactions
at home and in war; in the second half, "Of Things Divine," the state-
theology, the nature and significance of the colleges of experts,
of the holy places, of the religious festivals, of sacrificial
and votive gifts, and lastly of the gods themselves were summarily
unfolded.  Moreover, besides a number of monographs--
e. g. on the descent of the Roman people, on the Roman gentes
descended from Troy, on the tribes--there was added, as a larger
and more independent supplement, the treatise "Of the Life
of the Roman People"--a remarkable attempt at a history of Roman manners,
which sketched a picture of the state of domestic life, finance,
and culture in the regal, the early republican, the Hannibalic,
and the most recent period.  These labours of Varro were based
on an empiric knowledge of the Roman world and its adjacent Hellenic
domain more various and greater in its kind than any other Roman
either before or after him possessed--a knowledge to which living
observation and the study of literature alike contributed.
The eulogy of his contemporaries was well deserved, that Varro
had enabled his countrymen--strangers in their own world--to know
their position in their native land, and had taught the Romans
who and where they were.  But criticism and system will be sought for
in vain.  His Greek information seems to have come from somewhat
confused sources, and there are traces that even in the Roman field
the writer was not free from the influence of the historical
romance of his time.  The matter is doubtless inserted
in a convenient and symmetrical framework, but not classified
or treated methodically; and with all his efforts to bring tradition
and personal observation into harmony, the scientific labours of Varro
are not to be acquitted of a certain implicit faith in tradition
or of an unpractical scholasticism.(38)  The connection with Greek
philology consists in the imitation of its defects more than
of its excellences; for instance, the basing of etymologies
on mere similarity of sound both in Varro himself and in the other
philologues of this epoch runs into pure guesswork and often
into downright absurdity.(39)  In its empiric confidence
and copiousness as well as in its empiric inadequacy and want of method
the Varronian vividly reminds us of the English national philology,
and just like the latter, finds its centre in the study
of the older drama.  We have already observed that the monarchical
literature developed the rules of language in contradistinction
to this linguistic empiricism.(40)  It is in a high degree significant
that there stands at the head of the modern grammarians no less a man
than Caesar himself, who in his treatise on Analogy (given forth
between 696 and 704) first undertook to bring free language
under the power of law.

The Other Professional Sciences

Alongside of this extraordinary stir in the field of philology
The small amount of activity in the other sciences is surprising.
What appeared of importance in philosophy--such as Lucretius'
representation of the Epicurean system in the poetical child-dress
of the pre-Socratic philosophy, and the better writings of Cicero--
produced its effect and found its audience not through its
philosophic contents, but in spite of such contents solely
through its aesthetic form; the numerous translations of Epicurean
writings and the Pythagorean works, such as Varro's great treatise
on the Elements of Numbers and the still more copious one of Figulus
concerning the Gods, had beyond doubt neither scientific
nor formal value.

Even the professional sciences were but feebly cultivated. Varro's
Books on Husbandry written in the form of dialogue are no doubt
more methodical than those of his predecessors Cato and Saserna--
on which accordingly he drops many a side glance of censure--
but have on the whole proceeded more from the study than, like those
earlier works, from living experience.  Of the juristic labours of Varro
and of Servius Sulpicius Rufus (consul in 703) hardly aught more
can be said, than that they contributed to the dialectic
and philosophical embellishment of Roman jurisprudence.  And there is
nothing farther here to be mentioned, except perhaps the three
books of Gaius Matius on cooking, pickling, and making preserves--
so far as we know, the earliest Roman cookery-book, and, as the work
of a man of rank, certainly a phenomenon deserving of  notice.
That mathematics and physics were stimulated by the increased
Hellenistic and utilitarian tendencies of the monarchy, is apparent
from their growing importance in the instruction of youth (41)
and from various practical applications; under which, besides
the reform of the calendar,(42) may perhaps be included the appearance
of wall-maps at this period, the technical improvements
in shipbuilding and in musical instruments, designs and buildings
like the aviary specified by Varro, the bridge of piles over the Rhine
executed by the engineers of Caesar, and even two semicircular
stages of boards arranged for being pushed together, and employed
first separately as two theatres and then jointly as an amphitheatre.
The public exhibition of foreign natural curiosities at the popular
festivals was not unusual; and the descriptions of remarkable animals,
which Caesar has embodied in the reports of his campaigns,
show that, had an Aristotle appeared, he would have again
found his patron-prince.  But such literary performances
as are mentioned in this department are essentially associated
with Neopythagoreanism, such as the comparison of Greek and Barbarian,
i. e. Egyptian, celestial observations by Figulus, and his writings
concerning animals, winds, and generative organs.  After Greek
physical research generally had swerved from the Aristotelian effort
to find amidst individual facts the law, and had more and more
passed into an empiric and mostly uncritical observation of the external
and surprising in nature, natural science when coming forward
as a mystical philosophy of nature, instead of enlightening
and stimulating, could only still more stupefy and paralyze;
and in presence of such a method it was better to rest satisfied
with the platitude which Cicero delivers as Socratic wisdom,
that the investigation of nature either seeks after things
which nobody can know, or after such things as nobody needs to know.

Art
Architecture

If, in fine, we cast a glance at art, we discover here
the same unpleasing phenomena which pervade the whole mental life
of this period.  Building on the part of the state was virtually
brought to a total stand amidst the scarcity of money that marked
the last age of the republic.  We have already spoken of the luxury
in building of the Roman grandees; the architects learned in consequence
of this to be lavish of marble--the coloured sorts such as
the yellow Numidian (Giallo antico) and others came into vogue
at this time, and the marble-quarries of Luna (Carrara)
were now employed for the first time--and began to inlay the floors
of the rooms with mosaic work, to panel the walls with slabs of marble,
or to paint the compartments in imitation of marble--the first steps
towards the subsequent fresco-painting.  But art was not a gainer
by this lavish magnificence.

Arts of Design

In the arts of design connoisseurship and collecting were always
on the increase.  It was a mere affectation of Catonian simplicity,
when an advocate spoke before the jurymen of the works of art
"of a certain Praxiteles"; every one travelled and inspected,
and the trade of the art-ciceroni, or, as they were then called,
the -exegetae-, was none of the worst.  Ancient works of art
were formally hunted after--statues and pictures less, it is true,
than, in accordance with the rude character of Roman luxury,
artistically wrought furniture and ornaments of all sorts for the room
and the table.  As early as that age the old Greek tombs of Capua
and Corinth were ransacked for the sake of the bronze and earthenware
vessels which had been placed in the tomb along with the dead.
for a small statuette of bronze 40,000 sesterces (400 pounds)
were paid, and 200,000 (2000 pounds) for a pair of costly carpets;
a well-wrought bronze cooking machine came to cost more than
an estate.  In this barbaric hunting after art the rich amateur was,
as might be expected, frequently cheated by those who supplied him;
but the economic ruin of Asia Minor in particular so exceedingly rich
in artistic products brought many really ancient and rare ornaments
and works of art into the market, and from Athens, Syracuse,
Cyzicus, Pergamus, Chios, Samos, and other ancient seats of art,
everything that was for sale and very much that was not migrated
to the palaces and villas of the Roman grandees.  We have
already mentioned what treasures of art were to be found within
the house of Lucullus, who indeed was accused, perhaps not unjustly,
of having gratified his interest in the fine arts at the expense
of his duties as a general.  The amateurs of art crowded thither
as they crowd at present to the Villa Borghese, and complained
even then of such treasures being confined to the palaces
and country-houses of the men of quality, where they could be seen
only with difficulty and after special permission from the possessor.
The public buildings on the other hand were far from filled
in like proportion with famous works of Greek masters,
and in many cases there still stood in the temples of the capital
nothing but the old images of the gods carved in wood.
As to the exercise of art there is virtually nothing to report;
there is hardly mentioned by name from this period any Roman sculptor
or painter except a certain Arellius, whose pictures rapidly went off
not on account of their artistic value, but because the cunning reprobate
furnished, in his pictures of the goddesses faithful portraits
of his mistresses for the time being.

Dancing and Music

The importance of music and dancing increased in public
as in domestic life.  We have already set forth how theatrical music
and the dancing-piece attained to an independent standing
in the development of the stage at this period;(43) we may add
that now in Rome itself representations were very frequently given
by Greek musicians, dancers, and declaimers on the public stage--
such as were usual in Asia Minor and generally in the whole Hellenic
and Hellenizing world.(44)  To these fell to be added the musicians
and dancing-girls who exhibited their arts to order at table
and elsewhere, and the special choirs of stringed and wind instruments
and singers which were no longer rare in noble houses.  But that even
the world of quality itself played and sang with diligence, is shown
by the very adoption of music into the cycle of the generally
recognized subjects of instruction;(45) as to dancing, it was,
to say nothing of women, made matter of reproach even against
consulars that they exhibited themselves in dancing performances
amidst a small circle.

Incipient Influence of the Monarchy

Towards the end of this period, however, there appears
with the commencement of the monarchy the beginning of a better time
also in art.  We have already mentioned the mighty stimulus
which building in the capital received, and building throughout
the empire was destined to receive, through Caesar.  Even in the cutting
of the dies of the coins there appears about 700 a remarkable change;
the stamping, hitherto for the most part rude and negligent,
is thenceforward managed with more delicacy and care.

Conclusion

We have reached the end of the Roman republic.  We have seen
it rule for five hundred years in Italy and in the countries
on the Mediterranean; we have seen it brought to ruin in politics
and morals, religion and literature, not through outward violence
but through inward decay, and thereby making room for the new monarchy
of Caesar.  There was in the world, as Caesar found it, much
of the noble heritage of past centuries and an infinite abundance of pomp
and glory, but little spirit, still less taste, and least of all
true delight in life.  It was indeed an old world; and even
the richly-gifted patriotism of Caesar could not make it young again.
The dawn does not return till after the night has fully set in
and run its course.  But yet with him there came to the sorely harassed
peoples on the Mediterranean a tolerable evening after the sultry noon;
and when at length after a long historical night the new day dawned
once more for the peoples, and fresh nations in free self-movement
commenced their race towards new and higher goals, there were found
among them not a few, in which the seed sown by Caesar had sprung up,
and which owed, as they still owe, to him their national individuality.




Notes for Chapter I

1.  IV. VII. Bestowal of Latin Rights on the Italian Celts, 527

2.  It is a significant trait, that a distinguished teacher of
literature, the freedman Staberius Eros, allowed the children of
the proscribed to attend his course gratuitously.

3.  IV. X. Proscription-Lists

4.  IV. IX. Pompeius

5.  IV. IV. Administration under the Restoration

6.  IV. IV. Livius Drusus

7.  IV. IX. Government of Cinna

8.  IV. IX. Pompeius

9.  IV. IX. Sertorius Embarks

10.  IV. VII. Strabo, IV. IX. Dubious Attitude of Strabo

11.  IV. IX. Carbo Assailed on Three Sides of Etruria

12.  IV. VII. Rejection of the Proposals for an Accomodation

13.  IV. X. Reorganization of the Senate

14.  It is usual to set down the year 654 as that of Caesar's
birth, because according to Suetonius (Caes. 88), Plutarch (Caes.
69), and Appian (B. C. ii. 149) he was at his death (15 March 710)
in his 56th year; with which also the statement that he was 18
years old at the time of the Sullan proscription (672; Veil. ii.
41) nearly accords.  But this view is utterly inconsistent with
the facts that Caesar filled the aedileship in 689, the praetorship in
692, and the consulship in 695, and that these offices could,
according to the -leges annales-, be held at the very earliest in
the 37th-38th, 40th-41st, and 43rd-44th years of a man's life
respectively.  We cannot conceive why Caesar should have filled all
the curule offices two years before the legal time, and still less
why there should be no mention anywhere of his having done so.
These facts rather suggest the conjecture that, as his birthday
fell undoubtedly on July 12, he was born not in 654, but in 652; so
that in 672 he was in his 20th-21st year, and he died not in his
56th year, but at the age of 57 years 8 months.  In favour of this
latter view we may moreover adduce the circumstance, which has been
strangely brought forward in opposition to it, that Caesar "-paene
puer-" was appointed by Marius and Cinna as Flamen of Jupiter
(Veil. ii. 43); for Marius died in January 668, when Caesar was,
according to the usual view, 13 years 6 months old, and therefore
not "almost," as Velleius says, but actually still a boy, and most
probably for this very reason not at all capable of holding such
a priesthood.  If, again, he was born in July 652, he was at
the death of Marius in his sixteenth year; and with this the expression
in Velleius agrees, as well as the general rule that civil
positions were not assumed before the expiry of the age of boyhood.
Further, with this latter view alone accords the fact that
the -denarii- struck by Caesar about the outbreak of the civil war are
marked with the number LII, probably the year of his life; for
when it began, Caesar's age was according to this view somewhat
over 52 years.  Nor is it so rash as it appears to us who are
accustomed to regular and official lists of births, to charge our
authorities with an error in this respect.  Those four statements
may very well be all traceable to a common source; nor can they at
all lay claim to any very high credibility, seeing that for
the earlier period before the commencement of the -acta diurna-
the statements as to the natal years of even the best known and most
prominent Romans, e. g. as to that of Pompeius, vary in the most
surprising manner. (Comp. Staatsrecht, I. 8 p. 570.)

In the Life of Caesar by Napoleon III (B. 2, ch. 1) it is objected
to this view, first, that the -lex annalis- would point for
Caesar's birth-year not to 652, but to 651; secondly and
especially, that other cases are known where it was not attended
to.  But the first assertion rests on a mistake; for, as
the example of Cicero shows, the -lex annalis- required only that at
the entering on office the 43rd year should be begun, not that it
should be completed.  None of the alleged exceptions to the rule,
moreover, are pertinent.  When Tacitus (Ann. xi. 22) says that
formerly in conferring magistracies no regard was had to age, and
that the consulate and dictatorship were entrusted to quite young
men, he has in view, of course, as all commentators acknowledge,
the earlier period before the issuing of the -leges annales---the
consulship of M. Valerius Corvus at twenty-three, and similar
cases.  The assertion that Lucullus received the supreme magistracy
before the legal age is erroneous; it is only stated (Cicero, Acad.
pr. i. 1) that on the ground of an exceptional clause not more
particularly known to us, in reward for some sort of act performed
by him, he had a dispensation from the legal two years' interval
between the aedileship and praetorship--in reality he was aedile in
675, probably praetor in 677, consul in 680.  That the case of
Pompeius was a totally different one is obvious; but even as to
Pompeius, it is on several occasions expressly stated (Cicero, de
Imp. Pomp, ax, 62; Appian, iii. 88) that the senate released him
from the laws as to age.  That this should have been done with
Pompeius, who had solicited the consulship as a commander-in-chief
crowned with victory and a triumphator, at the head of an army and
after his coalition with Crassus also of a powerful party, we can
readily conceive.  But it would be in the highest degree
surprising, if the same thing should have been done with Caesar on
his candidature for the minor magistracies, when he was of little
more importance than other political beginners; and it would be, if
possible, more surprising still, that, while there is mention of
that--in itself readily understood--exception, there should be no
notice of this more than strange deviation, however naturally such
notices would have suggested themselves, especially with reference
to Octavianus consul at 21 (comp., e. g., Appian, iii. 88).  When
from these irrelevant examples the inference is drawn, "that
the law was little observed in Rome, where distinguished men were
concerned," anything more erroneous than this sentence was never
uttered regarding Rome and the Romans.  The greatness of the Roman
commonwealth, and not less that of its great generals and
statesmen, depends above all things on the fact that the law held
good in their case also.

15.  IV. IX. Spain

16.  At least the outline of these organizations must be assigned
to the years 674, 675, 676, although the execution of them
doubtless belonged, in great part, only to the subsequent years.

17  IV. IX. The Provinces

18.  The following narrative rests substantially on the account of
Licinianus, which, fragmentary as it is at this very point, still
gives important information as to the insurrection of Lepidus.

19.  Under the year 676 Licinianus states (p. 23, Pertz; p. 42,
Bonn); [Lepidus?] -[le]gem frumentari[am] nullo resistente
l[argi]tus est, ut annon[ae] quinque modi popu[lo da]rentur-.
According to this account, therefore, the law of the consuls of 681
Marcus Terentius Lucullus and Gaius Cassius Varus, which Cicero
mentions (in Verr. iii. 70, 136; v. 21, 52), and to which also
Sallust refers (Hist. iii. 61, 19 Dietsch), did not first reestablish
the five -modii-, but only secured the largesses of grain by
regulating the purchases of Sicilian corn, and perhaps made
various alterations of detail.  That the Sempronian law
(IV. III. Alterations on the Constitution By Gaius Gracchus)
allowed every burgess domiciled in Rome to share in the largesses
of grain, is certain.  But the later distribution of grain was not
so extensive as this, for, seeing that the monthly corn of
the Roman burgesses amounted to little more than 33,000 -medimni- =
198,000 -modii- (Cic. Verr. iii. 30, 72), only some 40,000
burgesses at that time received grain, whereas the number of
burgesses domiciled in the capital was certainly far more
considerable.  This arrangement probably proceeded from
the Octavian law, which introduced instead of the extravagant
Sempronian amount "a moderate largess, tolerable for the state and
necessary for the common people" (Cic. de Off. ii. 21, 72, Brut.
62, 222); and to all appearance it is this very law that is
the -lex frumentaria- mentioned by Licinianus.  That Lepidus should have
entered into such a proposal of compromise, accords with his attitude
as regards the restoration of the tribunate.  It is likewise in
keeping with the circumstances that the democracy should find itself
not at all satisfied by the regulation, brought about in this way,
of the distribution of grain (Sallust, l. c.).  The amount of loss
is calculated on the basis of the grain being worth at least double
(IV. III. Alterations on the Constitution By Gaius Gracchus);
when piracy or other causes drove up the price of grain,
a far more considerable loss must have resulted.

20.  From the fragments of the account of Licinianus (p. 44, Bonn)
it is plain that the decree of the senate, -uti Lepidus et Catulus
decretis exercitibus maturrime proficiscerentur- (Sallust, Hist. i.
44 Dietsch), is to be understood not of a despatch of the consuls
before the expiry of their consulship to their proconsular
provinces, for which there would have been no reason, but of their
being sent to Etruria against the revolted Faesulans, just as in
the Catilinarian war the consul Gaius Antonius was despatched to
the same quarter.  The statement of Philippus in Sallust (Hist. i.
48, 4) that Lepidus -ob seditionem provinciam cum exercitu adeptus
est-, is entirely in harmony with this view; for the extraordinary
consular command in Etruria was just as much a -provincia- as
the ordinary proconsular command in Narbonese Gaul.

21.  III. IV. Hannibal's Passage of the Alps

22.  In the recently found fragments of Sallust, which appear to
belong to the campaign of 679, the following words relate to this
incident: -Romanus [exer]citus (of Pompeius) frumenti gra[tia
r]emotus in Vascones i... [it]emque Sertorius mon... e, cuius
multum in[terer]it, ne ei perinde Asiae [iter et Italiae
intercluderetur].




Notes for Chapter II

1.  IV. VIII. New Difficulties

2.  IV. VIII. Preliminaries of Delium, IV. VIII. Peace at Dardanus

3.  IV. IX. Fresh Difficulties with Mithradates

4.  IV. I. Cilicia

5.  IV. I. Piracy

6.  IV. I. Crete

7.  The foundation of the kingdom of Edessa is placed by native
chronicles in 620 (IV. I. The Parthian Empire), but it was not till
some time after its rise that it passed into the hands of the Arabic
dynasty bearing the names of Abgarus and Mannus, which we afterwards
find there.  This dynasty is obviously connected with the settlement
of many Arabs by Tigranes the Great in the region of Edessa,
Callirrhoe, Carrhae (Plin. H. N. v. 20, 85; ax, 86; vi. 28, 142);
respecting which Plutarch also (Luc. 21) states that Tigranes,
changing the habits of the tent-Arabs, settled them nearer to his
kingdom in order by their means to possess himself of the trade.
We may presumably take this to mean that the Bedouins, who were
accustomed to open routes for traffic through their territory and
to levy on these routes fixed transit-dues (Strabo, xvi. 748), were
to serve the great-king as a sort of toll-supervisors, and to levy
tolls for him and themselves at the passage of the Euphrates.
These "Osrhoenian Arabs" (-Orei Arabes-), as Pliny calls them,
must also be the Arabs on Mount Amanus, whom Afranius subdued
(Plut. Pomp. 39).

8.  The disputed question, whether this alleged or real testament
proceeded from Alexander I (d. 666) or Alexander II (d. 673), is
usually decided in favour of the former alternative.  But
the reasons are inadequate; for Cicero (de L. Agr. i. 4, 12; 15, 38;
16, 41) does not say that Egypt fell to Rome in 666, but that it
did so in or after this year; and while the circumstance that
Alexander I died abroad, and Alexander II in Alexandria, has led
some to infer that the treasures mentioned in the testament in
question as lying in Tyre must have belonged to the former, they
have overlooked that Alexander II was killed nineteen days after
his arrival in Egypt (Letronne, Inscr, de I'Egypte, ii. 20), when
his treasure might still very well be in Tyre.  On the other hand
the circumstance that the second Alexander was the last genuine
Lagid is decisive, for in the similar acquisitions of Pergamus,
Cyrene, and Bithynia it was always by the last scion of
the legitimate ruling family that Rome was appointed heir.  The ancient
constitutional law, as it applied at least to the Roman client-
states, seems to have given to the reigning prince the right of
ultimate disposal of his kingdom not absolutely, but only in
the absence of -agnati- entitled to succeed.  Comp. Gutschmid's remark
in the German translation of S. Sharpe's History of Egypt, ii. 17.

Whether the testament was genuine or spurious, cannot be ascertained,
and is of no great moment; there are no special reasons for
assuming a forgery.

9.  IV. IX. Fresh Difficulties with Mithradates

10.  IV. VIII. Cyrene Roman

11.  V. I. Collapse of the Power of Sertorius

12.  IV. IV. The Provinces

13.  IV. VIII. Lucullus and the Fleet on the Asiatic Coast

14.  IV. VIII. Flaccus Arrives in Asia

15.  III. V. Attitude of the Romans, III. VI. The African Expedition
of Scipio

16.  That Tigranocerta was situated in the region of Mardln some
two days' march to the west of Nisibis, has been proved by
the investigation instituted on the spot by Sachau ("-Ueber die Lage
von Tigranokerta-," Abh. der Berliner Akademie, 1880), although
the more exact fixing of the locality proposed by Sachau is not beyond
doubt.  On the other hand, his attempt to clear up the campaign of
Lucullus encounters the difficulty that, on the route assumed in
it, a crossing of the Tigris is in reality out of the question.

17.  Cicero (De Imp. Pomp. 9, 23) hardly means any other than one
of the rich temples of the province Elymais, whither the predatory
expeditions of the Syrian and Parthian kings were regularly
directed (Strabo, xvi. 744; Polyb, xxxi. 11. 1 Maccab. 6, etc.),
and probably this as the best known; on no account can
the allusion be to the temple of Comana or any shrine at all in
the kingdom of Pontus.

18.  V. II. Preparations of Mithradates, 328, 334

19.  V. II. Invasion of Pontus by Lucullus

20.  V. II. Roman Preparations

21.  V. I. Want of Leaders

22.  V. II. Maritime War

23.  IV. I. Crete

24.  IV. II. The First Sicilian Slave War, IV. IV. Revolts of the Slaves

25.  These enactments gave rise to the conception of robbery
as a separate crime, while the older law comprehended robbery
under theft.

26.  V. II. The Pirates in the Mediterranean

27.  As the line was thirty-five miles long (Sallust, Hist, iv, 19,
Dietsch; Plutarch, Crass. 10), it probably passed not from
Squillace to Pizzo, but more to the north, somewhere near
Castrovillari and Cassano, over the peninsula which is here in
a straight line about twenty-seven miles broad.

28.  That Crassus was invested with the supreme command in 682,
follows from the setting aside of the consuls (Plutarch, Crass.
10); that the winter of 682-683 was spent by the two armies at
the Bruttian wall, follows from the "snowy night" (Plut. l. c).




Notes for Chapter III

1.  IV. X. Assignations to the Soldiers

2.  V. I. Pompeius

3.  IV. X. Abolition of the Gracchan Institutions

4.  V. II. The Insurrection Takes Shape

5.  V. III. Attacks on the Senatorial Tribunals

6.  V. I. Insurrection of Lepidus

7.  IV. X. Co-optation Restored in the Priestly Colleges

8.  V. II. Mutiny of the Soldiers

9.  IV. IV. Marius Commander-in-Chief

10.  The extraordinary magisterial power (-pro consule-, -pro
praetore-, -pro quaestore-) might according to Roman state-law
originate in three ways.  Either it arose out of the principle
which held good for the non-urban magistracy, that the office
continued up to the appointed legal term, but the official
authority up to the arrival of the successor, which was the oldest,
simplest, and most frequent case.  Or it arose in the way of
the appropriate organs--especially the comitia, and in later times also
perhaps the senate--nominating a chief magistrate not contemplated
in the constitution, who was otherwise on a parity with
the ordinary magistrate, but in token of the extraordinary nature of
his office designated himself merely "instead of a praetor" or "of
a consul." To this class belong also the magistrates nominated in
the ordinary way as quaestors, and then extraordinarily furnished
with praetorian or even consular official authority (-quaestores
pro praetore- or -pro consule-); in which quality, for example,
Publius Lentulus Marcellinus went in 679 to Cyrene (Sallust, Hist.
ii. 39 Dietsch), Gnaeus Piso in 689 to Hither Spain (Sallust, Cat.
19), and Cato in 696 to Cyprus (Vell. ii. 45).  Or, lastly,
the extraordinary magisterial authority was based on the right of
delegation vested in the supreme magistrate.  If he left the bounds
of his province or otherwise was hindered from administering his
office, he was entitled to nominate one of those about him as his
substitute, who was then called -legatus pro praetore-(Sallust,
lug. 36, 37, 38), or, if the choice fell on the quaestor, -quaestor
pro praetore- (Sallust, Iug. 103).  In like manner he was entitled,
if he had no quaestor, to cause the quaestorial duties to be
discharged by one of his train, who was then called -legatus pro
quaestore-, a name which is to be met with, perhaps for the first
time, on the Macedonian tetradrachms of Sura, lieutenant of
the governor of Macedonia, 665-667.  But it was contrary to the nature
of delegation and therefore according to the older state-law
inadmissible, that the supreme magistrate should, without having
met with any hindrance in the discharge of his functions,
immediately upon his entering on office invest one or more of
his subordinates with supreme official authority; and so far
the -legati pro praetore-of the proconsul Pompeius were an innovation,
and already similar in kind to those who played so great a part in
the times of the Empire.

11.  V. III. Attempts to Restore the Tribunician Power

12.  According to the legend king Romulus was torn in pieces
by the senators.

13.  IV. II. Further Plans of Gracchus




Notes for Chapter IV

1.  V. III. Senate, Equites, and Populares

2.  V. II. Metellus Subdues Crete

3.  [Literally "twenty German miles"; but the breadth of the island
does not seem in reality half so much.--Tr.]

4.  V. II. Renewal of the War

5.  Pompeius distributed among his soldiers and officers as
presents 384,000,000 sesterces (=16,000 talents, App. Mithr.
116); as the officers received 100,000,000 (Plin. H. N. xxxvii. 2,
16) and each of the common soldiers 6000 sesterces (Plin., App.),
the army still numbered at its triumph about 40,000 men.

6.  V. II. Sieges of the Pontic Cities

7.  V. II. All the Armenian Conquests Pass into the Hands of the Romans

8.  V. II. Syria under Tigranes

9.  V. II. Syria under Tigranes

10.  IV. I. The Jews

11.  V. II. Siege and Battle of Tigranocerta

12.  Thus the Sadducees rejected the doctrine of angels and spirits
and the resurrection of the dead.  Most of the traditional points
of difference between Pharisees and Sadducees relate to subordinate
questions of ritual, jurisprudence, and the calendar.  It is
a characteristic fact, that the victorious Pharisees have introduced
those days, on which they definitively obtained the superiority in
particular controversies or ejected heretical members from
the supreme consistory, into the list of the memorial and festival
days of the nation.

13.  V. II. All the Armenian Conquests Pass into the Hands of the Romans

14.  V. II. Beginning of the Armenian War, V. II. All the Armenian
Conquests Pass into the Hands of the Romans

15.  Pompeius spent the winter of 689-690 still in
the neighbourhood of the Caspian Sea (Dio, xxxvii. 7).  In 690 he first
reduced the last strongholds still offering resistance in
the kingdom of Pontus, and then moved slowly, regulating matters
everywhere, towards the south.  That the organization of Syria
began in 690 is confirmed by the fact that the Syrian provincial
era begins with this year, and by Cicero's statement respecting
Commagene (Ad Q. fr. ii. 12, 2; comp. Dio, xxxvii. 7).  During
the winter of 690-691 Pompeius seems to have had his headquarters in
Antioch (Joseph, xiv. 3, 1, 2, where the confusion has been
rectified by Niese in the Hermes, xi. p. 471).

16.  III. V. New Warlike Preparations in Rome

17.  III. IV. War Party and Peace Party in Carthage

18.  Orosius indeed (vi. 6) and Dio (xxxvii. 15), both of them
doubtless following Livy, make Pompeius get to Petra and occupy
the city or even reach the Red Sea; but that he, on the contrary, soon
after receiving the news of the death of Mithradates, which came to
him on his march towards Jerusalem, returned from Syria to Pontus,
is stated by Plutarch (Pomp. 41, 42) and is confirmed by Floras (i.
39) and Josephus (xiv. 3, 3, 4).  If king Aretas figures in
the bulletins among those conquered by Pompeius, this is
sufficiently accounted for by his withdrawal from Jerusalem
at the instigation of Pompeius.

19.  V. II. Renewal of the War, V. IV. Variance between Mithradates
and Tigranes

20.  This view rests on the narrative of Plutarch (Pomp. 36) which
is supported by Strabo's (xvi. 744) description of the position of
the satrap of Elymais.  It is an embellishment of the matter, when
in the lists of the countries and kings conquered by Pompeius Media
and its king Darius are enumerated (Diodorus, Fr, Vat. p. 140;
Appian, Mithr. 117); and from this there has been further concocted
the war of Pompeius with the Medes (Veil. ii. 40; Appian, Mithr.
106, 114) and then even his expedition to Ecbatana (Oros. vi. 5).
A confusion with the fabulous town of the same name on Carmel has
hardly taken place here; it is simply that intolerable
exaggeration--apparently originating in the grandiloquent and
designedly ambiguous bulletins of Pompeius--which has converted his
razzia against the Gaetulians (p. 94) into a march to the west
coast of Africa (Plut. Pomp. 38), his abortive expedition against
the Nabataeans into a conquest of the city of Petra, and his award
as to the boundaries of Armenia into a fixing of the boundary of
the Roman empire beyond Nisibis.

21.  The war which this Antiochus is alleged to have waged with
Pompeius (Appian, Mithr. 106, 117) is not very consistent with
the treaty which he concluded with Lucullus (Dio, xxxvi. 4), and his
undisturbed continuance in his sovereignty; presumably it has been
concocted simply from the circumstance, that Antiochus of Commagene
figured among the kings subdued by Pompeius.

22.  To this Cicero's reproach presumably points (De Off. iii. 12,
49): -piratas immunes habemus, socios vectigales-; in so far,
namely, as those pirate-colonies probably had the privilege of
immunity conferred on them by Pompeius, while, as is well known,
the provincial communities dependent on Rome were, as a rule,
liable to taxation.

23.  IV. VIII. Pontus

24.  V. IV. Battle at Nicopolis

25.  V. II. Defeat of the Romans in Pontus at Ziela

26.  V. IV. Pompeius Take the Supreme Command against Mithradates

27.  IV. VIII. Weak Counterpreparations of the Romans ff.

28.  V. II. Egypt not Annexed

29.  V. IV. Urban Communities




Notes for Chapter V

1.  V. III. Renewal of the Censorship

2.  IV. VI. Political Projects of Marius

3.  IV. X. Co-optation Restored in the Priestly Colleges

4.  IV. VII. The Sulpician Laws

5.  IV. X. Permanent and Special -Quaestiones-

6.  IV. VI. And Overpowered

7.  IV. VII. Bestowal of Latin Rights on the Italian Celts

8.  Any one who surveys the whole state of the political relations
of this period will need no special proofs to help him to see that
the ultimate object of the democratic machinations in 688 et seq.
was not the overthrow of the senate, but that of Pompeius.  Yet
such proofs are not wanting.  Sallust states that the Gabinio-
Manilian laws inflicted a mortal blow on the democracy (Cat. 39);
that the conspiracy of 688-689 and the Servilian rogation were
specially directed against Pompeius, is likewise attested (Sallust
Cat. 19; Val. Max. vi. 2, 4; Cic. de Lege Agr. ii. 17, 46).
Besides the attitude of Crassus towards the conspiracy alone shows
sufficiently that it was directed against Pompeius.

9.  V. V. Transpadanes

10.  Plutarch, Crass. 13; Cicero, de Lege agr. ii. 17, 44.  To this
year (689) belongs Cicero's oration -de rege Alexandrino-, which
has been incorrectly assigned to the year 698.  In it Cicero
refutes, as the fragments clearly show, the assertion of Crassus,
that Egypt had been rendered Roman property by the testament of
king Alexander.  This question of law might and must have been
discussed in 689; but in 698 it had been deprived of its
significance through the Julian law of 695.  In 698 moreover
the discussion related not to the question to whom Egypt belonged, but
to the restoration of the king driven out by a revolt, and in this
transaction which is well known to us Crassus played no part.
Lastly, Cicero after the conference of Luca was not at all in
a position seriously to oppose one of the triumvirs.

11.  V. IV. Pompeius Proceeds to Colchis

12.  V. III. Attacks on the Senatorial Tribunals, V. III. Renewal
of the Censorship

13.  The -Ambrani- (Suet. Caes. 9) are probably not the Ambrones
named along with the Cimbri (Plutarch, Mar. 19), but a slip of
the pen for -Arverni-.

14.  This cannot well be expressed more naively than is done in
the memorial ascribed to his brother (de pet. cons. i, 5; 13, 51, 53;
in 690); the brother himself would hardly have expressed his mind
publicly with so much frankness.  In proof of this unprejudiced
persons will read not without interest the second oration against
Rullus, where the "first democratic consul," gulling the friendly
public in a very delectable fashion, unfolds to it the "true democracy."

15.  His epitaph still extant runs: -Cn. Calpurnius Cn. f. Piso
quaestor fro pr. ex s. c. proviniciam Hispaniam citeriorem optinuit-.

16.  V. V. Failure of the First Plans of Conspiracy

17.  V. III. Continued Subsistence of the Sullan Constitution

18.  IV. XII. Priestly Colleges

19.  IV. VII. Economic Crisis

20.  V. V. Rehabilitation of Saturninus and Marius

21.  Such an apology is the -Catilina- of Sallust, which was
published by the author, a notorious Caesarian, after the year 708,
either under the monarchy of Caesar or more probably under
the triumvirate of his heirs; evidently as a treatise with a political
drift, which endeavours to bring into credit the democratic party--
on which in fact the Roman monarchy was based--and to clear
Caesar's memory from the blackest stain that rested on it; and with
the collateral object of whitewashing as far as possible the uncle
of the triumvir Marcus Antonius (comp. e. g. c. 59 with Dio,
xxxvii. 39).  The Jugurtha of the same author is in an exactly
similar way designed partly to expose the pitifulness of
the oligarchic government, partly to glorify the Coryphaeus of
the democracy, Gaius Marius.  The circumstance that the adroit author
keeps the apologetic and inculpatory character of these writings of
his in the background, proves, not that they are not partisan
treatises, but that they are good ones.

22.  V. XII. Greek Literati in Rome




Notes for Chapter VI

1.  V. IV. Aggregate Results

2.  The impression of the first address, which Pompeius made to
the burgesses after his return, is thus described by Cicero (ad Att. i.
14): -prima contio Pompei non iucunda miseris (the rabble), inanis
improbis (the democrats), beatis (the wealthy) non grata, bonis
(the aristocrats) non gravis; itaque frigebat-.

3.  IV. X. Regulating of the Qualifications for Office

4.  V. V. New Projects of the Conspirators

5.  V. VI. Pompeius without Influence

6.  IV. IX. Government of Cinna, IV. X. Punishments Inflicted
on Particular Communities

7.  IV. XII. Oriental Religions in Italy

8.  V. V. Transpadanes

9.  IV. X. Cisalpine Gaul Erected into a Province

10.  V. IV. Cyprus Annexed

11.  IV. VI. Violent Proceedings in the Voting

12.  V. IV. Cyprus Annexed




Notes for Chapter VII

1.  IV. I. The Callaeci Conquered

2.  IV. IX. Spain

3.  V. I. Renewed Outbreak of the Spanish Insurrection

4.  V. I. Pompeius in Gaul

5.  V. I. Indefinite and Perilous Character of the Sertorian War

6.  V. V. Conviction and Arrest of the Conspirators in the Capital

7.  V. I. Pompeius Puts and End to the Insurrection

8.  IV. II. Scipio Aemilianus

9.  There was found, for instance, at Vaison in the Vocontian
canton an inscription written in the Celtic language with
the ordinary Greek alphabet.  It runs thus: --segouaros ouilloneos
tooutious namausatis eiorou beileisamisosin nemeiton--.  The last
word means "holy."

10.  An immigration of Belgic Celts to Britain continuing for
a considerable time seems indicated by the names of English tribes on
both banks of the Thames borrowed from Belgic cantons; such as
the Atrebates, the Belgae, and even the Britanni themselves, which word
appears to have been transferred from the Brittones settled on
the Somme below Amiens first to an English canton and then to the whole
island.  The English gold coinage was also derived from the Belgic
and originally identical with it.

11.  The first levy of the Belgic cantons exclusive of the Remi,
that is, of the country between the Seine and the Scheldt and
eastward as far as the vicinity of Rheims and Andernach, from 9000
to 10,000 square miles, is reckoned at about 300,000 men; in
accordance with which, if we regard the proportion of the first
levy to the whole men capable of bearing arms specified for
the Bellovaci as holding good generally, the number of the Belgae
capable of bearing arms would amount to 500,000 and the whole
population accordingly to at least 2,000,000.  The Helvetii with
the adjoining peoples numbered before their migration 336,000; if
we assume that they were at that time already dislodged from
the right bank of the Rhine, their territory may be estimated at nearly
1350 square miles.  Whether the serfs are included in this, we can
the less determine, as we do not know the form which slavery
assumed amongst the Celts; what Caesar relates (i. 4) as to
the slaves, clients, and debtors of Orgetorix tells rather in favour
of, than against, their being included.

That, moreover, every such attempt to make up by combinations for
the statistical basis, in which ancient history is especially
deficient, must be received with due caution, will be at once
apprehended by the intelligent reader, while he will not absolutely
reject it on that account.

12.  "In the interior of Transalpine Gaul on the Rhine," says
Scrofa in Varro, De R. R. i. 7, 8, "when I commanded there, I
traversed some districts, where neither the vine nor the olive nor
the fruit-tree appears, where they manure the fields with white
Pit-chalk, where they have neither rock--nor sea-salt, but make use
of the saline ashes of certain burnt wood instead of salt." This
description refers probably to the period before Caesar and to
the eastern districts of the old province, such as the country of
the Allobroges; subsequently Pliny (H. N. xvii. 6, 42 seq.) describes
at length the Gallo-Britannic manuring with marl.

13.  "The Gallic oxen especially are of good repute in Italy, for
field labour forsooth; whereas the Ligurian are good for nothing."
(Varro, De R. R. ii. 5, 9).  Here, no doubt, Cisalpine Gaul is
referred to, but the cattle-husbandry there doubtless goes back to
the Celtic epoch.  Plautus already mentions the "Gallic ponies"
(-Gallici canterii-, Aul. iii. 5. 21).  "It is not every race that
is suited for the business of herdsmen; neither the Bastulians nor
the Turdulians" (both in Andalusia) "are fit for it; the Celts are
the best, especially as respects beasts for riding and burden
(-iumenta-)" (Varro, De R. R. ii. 10, 4).

14.  We are led to this conclusion by the designation of
the trading or "round" as contrasted with the "long" or war vessel, and
the similar contrast of the "oared ships" (--epikopoi veies--) and
the "merchantmen" (--olkades--, Dionys. iii. 44); and moreover by
the smallness of the crew in the trading vessels, which in the very
largest amounted to not more than 200 men (Rhein. Mus. N. F. xi.
625), while in the ordinary galley of three decks there were
employed 170 rowers (III. II. The Romans Build A Fleet). Comp. Movers,
Phoen. ii. 3, 167 seq.

15.  IV. V. Transalpine Relations of Rome

16.  IV. V. Defeat of Longinus

17.  IV. V. Transalpine Relations of Rome

18.  This remarkable word must have been in use as early as
the sixth century of Rome among the Celts in the valley of the Po; for
Ennius is already acquainted with it, and it can only have reached
the Italians at so early a period from that quarter.  It is not
merely Celtic, however, but also German, the root of our "Amt," as
indeed the retainer-system itself is common to the Celts and
the Germans.  It would be of great historical importance to ascertain
whether the word--and so also the thing--came to the Celts from
the Germans, or to the Germans from the Celts.  If, as is usually
supposed, the word is originally German and primarily signified
the servant standing in battle "against the back" (-and-= against,
-bak- = back) of his master, this is not wholly irreconcileable with
the singularly early occurrence of this word among the Celts.
According to all analogy the right to keep -ambacti-, that is,
--doouloi misthotoi--, cannot have belonged to the Celtic nobility
from the outset, but must only have developed itself gradually in
antagonism to the older monarchy and to the equality of the free
commons.  If thus the system of -ambacti- among the Celts was not
an ancient and national, but a comparatively recent institution, it
is--looking to the relation which had subsisted for centuries
between the Celts and Germans, and which is to be explained farther
on--not merely possible but even probable that the Celts, in Italy
as in Gaul, employed Germans chiefly as those hired servants-at-
arms.  The "Swiss guard" would therefore in that case be some
thousands of years older than people suppose.  Should the term by
which the Romans, perhaps after the example of the Celts, designate
the Germans as a nation-the name -Germani---be really of Celtic
origin, this obviously accords very well with that hypothesis.--No
doubt these assumptions must necessarily give way, should the word
-ambactus- be explained in a satisfactory way from a Celtic root;
as in fact Zeuss (Gramm. p. 796), though doubtfully, traces it to
-ambi- = around and -aig- = -agere-, viz. one moving round or moved
round, and so attendants, servants.  The circumstance that the word
occurs also as a Celtic proper name (Zeuss, p. 77), and is perhaps
preserved in the Cambrian -amaeth- = peasant, labourer (Zeuss, p.
156), cannot decide the point either way,

19.  From the Celtic words -guerg- = worker and -breth- = judgment.

20.  IV. V. Transalpine Relations of Rome

21.  The position which such a federal general occupied with
reference to his troops, is shown by the accusation of high treason
raised against Vercingetorix (Caesar, B. G. vii. 20).

22.  IV. V. The Cimbri

23.  II. IV. The Celts Assail the Etruscans in Northern Italy

24.  V. VII. Art and Science

25.  Caesar's Suebi thus were probably the Chatti; but that
designation certainly belonged in Caesar's time, and even much
later, also to every other German stock which could be described as
a regularly wandering one.  Accordingly if, as is not to be
doubted, the "king of the Suebi" in Mela (iii. i) and Pliny (H. N.
ii. 67, 170) was Ariovistus, it by no means therefore follows that
Ariovistus was a Chattan.  The Marcomani cannot be demonstrated as
a distinct people before Marbod; it is very possible that the word
up to that point indicates nothing but what it etymologically
signifies--the land, or frontier, guard.  When Caesar (i, 51)
mentions Marcomani among the peoples fighting in the army of
Ariovistus, he may in this instance have misunderstood a merely
appellative designation, just as he has decidedly done in
the case of the Suebi.

26.  IV. V. The Tribes at the Sources of the Rhine and Along
the Danube

27.  IV. V. The Tribes at the Sources of the Rhine and Along
the Danube

28.  IV. V. Teutones in the Province of Gaul

29.  The arrival of Ariovistus in Gaul has been placed, according
to Caesar, i. 36, in 683, and the battle of Admagetobriga (for such
was the name of the place now usually, in accordance with a false
inscription, called Magetobriga), according to Caesar i. 35 and
Cicero Ad. Att. i. 19, in 693.

30.  V. VII. Wars and Revolts There

31.  That we may not deem this course of things incredible, or even
impute to it deeper motives than ignorance and laziness in
statesmen, we shall do well to realize the frivolous tone in which
a distinguished senator like Cicero expresses himself in his
correspondence respecting these important Transalpine affairs.

32.  IV. V. Inroad of the Helvetii into Southern Gaul

33.  According to the uncorrected calendar.  According to
the current rectification, which however here by no means rests on
sufficiently trustworthy data, this day corresponds to the 16th of
April of the Julian calendar.

34.  IV. V. The Cimbri, Teutones, and Helvetii Unite

35.  -Julia Equestris-, where the last surname is to be taken as in
other colonies of Caesar the surnames of sextanorum, decimanorum,
etc.  It was Celtic or German horsemen of Caesar, who, of course
with the bestowal of the Roman or, at any rate, Latin franchise,
received land-allotments there.

36.  Goler (Caesars gall. Krieg, p. 45, etc.) thinks that he has
found the field of battle at Cernay not far from Muhlhausen, which,
on the whole, agrees with Napoleon's (Precis, p. 35) placing of
the battle-field in the district of Belfort.  This hypothesis, although
not certain, suits the circumstances of the case; for the fact that
Caesar required seven days' march for the short space from Besancon
to that point, is explained by his own remark (i. 41) that he had
taken a circuit of fifty miles to avoid the mountain paths; and
the whole description of the pursuit continued as far as the Rhine, and
evidently not lasting for several days but ending on the very day
of the battle, decides--the authority of tradition being equally
balanced--in favour of the view that the battle was fought five,
not fifty, miles from the Rhine.  The proposal of Rustow
(-Einleitung zu Caesars Comm-. p. 117) to transfer the field of
battle to the upper Saar rests on a misunderstanding.  The corn
expected from the Sequani, Leuci, Lingones was not to come to
the Roman army in the course of their march against Ariovistus, but to
be delivered at Besancon before their departure, and taken by
the troops along with them; as is clearly apparent from the fact that
Caesar, while pointing his troops to those supplies, comforts them
at the same time with the hope of corn to be brought in on
the route.  From Besancon Caesar commanded the region of Langres and
Epinal, and, as may be well conceived, preferred to levy his
requisitions there rather than in the exhausted districts from
which he came.

37.  This seems the simplest hypothesis regarding the origin of
these Germanic settlements.  That Ariovistus settled those peoples
on the middle Rhine is probable, because they fight in his army
(Caes. i. 51) and do not appear earlier; that Caesar left them in
possession of their settlements is probable, because he in presence
of Ariovistus declared himself ready to tolerate the Germans
already settled in Gaul (Caes. i. 35, 43), and because we find them
afterwards in these abodes.  Caesar does not mention the directions
given after the battle concerning these Germanic settlements,
because he keeps silence on principle regarding all the organic
arrangements made by him in Gaul.

38.  IV. V. The Cimbri, Teutones, and Helvetii Unite

39.  III. II. The Romans Build a Fleet

40.  V. I. Pompeius in Gaul

41.  V. VII. The Germans on the Lower Rhine

42.  The nature of the case as well as Caesar's express statement
proves that the passages of Caesar to Britain were made from ports
of the coast between Calais and Boulogne to the coast of Kent.
A more exact determination of the localities has often been
attempted, but without success.  All that is recorded is, that on
the first voyage the infantry embarked at one port, the cavalry at
another distant from the former eight miles in an easterly
direction (iv. 22, 23, 28), and that the second voyage was made
from that one of those two ports which Caesar had found most
convenient, the (otherwise not further mentioned) Portus Itius,
distant from the British coast 30 (so according to the MSS. of
Caesar v. 2) or 40 miles (=320 stadia, according to Strabo iv. 5,
2, who doubtless drew his account from Caesar).  From Caesar's
words (iv. 21) that he had chosen "the shortest crossing," we may
doubtless reasonably infer that he crossed not the Channel but
the Straits of Calais, but by no means that he crossed the latter by
the mathematically shortest line.  It requires the implicit faith
of local topographers to proceed to the determination of
the locality with such data in hand--data of which the best in itself
becomes almost useless from the variation of the authorities as to
the number; but among the many possibilities most may perhaps be
said in favour of the view that the Itian port (which Strabo l. c.
is probably right in identifying with that from which the infantry
crossed in the first voyage) is to be sought near Ambleteuse to
the west of Cape Gris Nez, and the cavalry-harbour near Ecale (Wissant)
to the east of the same promontory, and that the landing took place
to the east of Dover near Walmer Castle.

43.  That Cotta, although not lieutenant-general of Sabinus, but
like him legate, was yet the younger and less esteemed general and
was probably directed in the event of a difference to yield, may be
inferred both from the earlier services of Sabinus and from
the fact that, where the two are named together (iv. 22, 38; v. 24, 26,
52; vi. 32; otherwise in vi. 37) Sabinus regularly takes
precedence, as also from the narrative of the catastrophe itself.
Besides we cannot possibly suppose that Caesar should have placed
over a camp two officers with equal authority, and have made no
arrangement at all for the case of a difference of opinion.
the five cohorts are not counted as part of a legion (comp. vi. 32, 33)
any more than the twelve cohorts at the Rhine bridge (vi. 29, comp.
32, 33), and appear to have consisted of detachments of other
portions of the army, which had been assigned to reinforce this
camp situated nearest to the Germans.

44.  V. VII. Subjugation of the Belgae

45.  IV. V. War with the Allobroges and Arverni

46.  V. VII. Cantonal Constitution

47.  This, it is true, was only possible, so long as offensive
weapons chiefly aimed at cutting and stabbing.  In the modern mode
of warfare, as Napoleon has excellently explained, this system has
become inapplicable, because with our offensive weapons operating
from a distance the deployed position is more advantageous than
the concentrated.  In Caesar's time the reverse was the case.

48.  This place has been sought on a rising ground which is still
named Gergoie, a league to the south of the Arvernian capital
Nemetum, the modern Clermont; and both the remains of rude
fortress-walls brought to light in excavations there, and
the tradition of the name which is traced in documents up to the tenth
century, leave no room for doubt as to the correctness of this
determination of the locality.  Moreover it accords, as with
the other statements of Caesar, so especially with the fact that he
pretty clearly indicates Gergovia as the chief place of the Arverni
(vii. 4).  We shall have accordingly to assume, that the Arvernians
after their defeat were compelled to transfer their settlement from
Gergovia to the neighbouring less strong Nemetum.

49.  The question so much discussed of late, whether Alesia is not
rather to be identified with Alaise (25 kilometres to the south of
Besancon, dep. Doubs), has been rightly answered in the negative by
all judicious inquirers.

50.  This is usually sought at Capdenac not far from Figeac; Goler
has recently declared himself in favour of Luzech to the west of
Cahors, a site which had been previously suggested.

51.  This indeed, as may readily be conceived, is not recorded by
Caesar himself, but an intelligible hint on this subject is given
by Sallust (Hist. i. 9 Kritz), although he too wrote as a partisan
of Caesar.  Further proofs are furnished by the coins.

52.  Thus we read on a -semis- which a Vergobretus of the Lexovii
(Lisieux, dep. Calvados) caused to be struck, the following
inscription: -Cisiambos Cattos vercobreto; simissos (sic) publicos
Lixovio-.  The often scarcely legible writing and the incredibly
wretched stamping of these coins are in excellent harmony with
their stammering Latin.

53.  V. VII. Caesar and Ariovistus

54.  V. VII. The Helvetii Sent Back to Their Original Abodes

55.  V. VII. Beginning of the Struggle

56.  IV. V. Taurisci




Notes for Chapter VIII

1.  This is the meaning of -cantorum convitio contiones celebrare-
(Cic. pro Sest. 55, 118).

2.  V. VI. Clodius

3.  IV. V. The Victory and the Parties

4.  Cato was not yet in Rome when Cicero spoke on 11th March 698 in
favour of Sestius (Pro Sest. 28, 60) and when the discussion took
place in the senate in consequence of the resolutions of Luca
respecting Caesar's legions (Plut. Caes. 21); it is not till
the discussions at the beginning of 699 that we find him once more
busy, and, as he travelled in winter (Plut.  Cato Min. 38), he thus
returned to Rome in the end of 698.  He cannot therefore, as has
been mistakenly inferred from Asconius (p. 35, 53), have defended
Milo in Feb. 698.

5.  -Me asinum germanum fuisse- (Ad Att. iv. 5, 3).

6.  This palinode is the still extant oration on the Provinces to
be assigned to the consuls of 699.  It was delivered in the end of
May 698.  The pieces contrasting with it are the orations for
Sestius and against Vatinius and that upon the opinion of
the Etruscan soothsayers, dating from the months of March and April,
in which the aristocratic regime is glorified to the best of his
ability and Caesar in particular is treated in a very cavalier
tone.  It was but reasonable that Cicero should, as he himself
confesses (Ad Att. iv. 5, 1), be ashamed to transmit even to
intimate friends that attestation of his resumed allegiance.

7.  This is not stated by our authorities.  But the view that
Caesar levied no soldiers at all from the Latin communities, that
is to say from by far the greater part of his province, is in
itself utterly incredible, and is directly refuted by the fact that
the opposition-party slightingly designates the force levied by
Caesar as "for the most part natives of the Transpadane colonies"
(Caes. B. C. iii. 87); for here the Latin colonies of Strabo
(Ascon. in Pison. p. 3; Sueton. Caes. 8) are evidently meant.
Yet there is no trace of Latin cohorts in Caesar's Gallic army;
on the contrary according to his express statements all the recruits
levied by him in Cisalpine Gaul were added to the legions or
distributed into legions.  It is possible that Caesar combined
with the levy the bestowal of the franchise; but more probably he
adhered in this matter to the standpoint of his party, which did
not so much seek to procure for the Transpadanes the Roman
franchise as rather regarded it as already legally belonging to
them (iv. 457).  Only thus could the report spread, that Caesar had
introduced of his own authority the Roman municipal constitution
among the Transpadane communities (Cic. Ad Att. v. 3, 2; Ad Fam.
viii. 1, 2).  This hypothesis too explains why Hirtius designates
the Transpadane towns as "colonies of Roman burgesses" (B. G. viii.
24), and why Caesar treated the colony of Comum founded by him as
a burgess-colony (Sueton. Caes. 28; Strabo, v. 1, p. 213; Plutarch,
Caes. 29), while the moderate party of the aristocracy conceded to
it only the same rights as to the other Transpadane communities,
viz. Latin rights, and the ultras even declared the civic rights
conferred on the settlers as altogether null, and consequently did
not concede to the Comenses the privileges attached to the holding
of a Latin municipal magistracy (Cic. Ad Att. v. 11, 2; Appian, B.
C. ii. 26). Comp. Hermes, xvi. 30.

8.  V. VII. Fresh Violations of the Rhine-Boundary by the Germans

9.  The collection handed down to us is full of references to
the events of 699 and 700 and was doubtless published in the latter
year; the most recent event, which it mentions, is the prosecution
of Vatinius (Aug. 700). The statement of Hieronymus that Catullus
died in 697-698 requires therefore to be altered only by a few
years. From the circumstance that Vatinius "swears falsely by his
consulship," it has been erroneously inferred that the collection
did not appear till after the consulate of Vatinius (707); it
only follows from it that Vatinius, when the collection appeared,
might already reckon on becoming consul in a definite year,
for which he had every reason as early as 700; for his name
certainly stood on the list of candidates agreed on at Luca
(Cicero, Ad. Att. iv. 8 b. 2).

10.  The well-known poem of Catullus (numbered as xxix.)
was written in 699 or 700 after Caesar's Britannic expedition
and before the death of Julia:

-Quis hoc potest videre, quis potest pati, Nisi impudicus et vorax
et aleo, Mamurram habere quod comata Gallia Habebat ante et ultima
Britannia-? etc.

Mamurra of Formiae, Caesar's favourite and for a time during
the Gallic wars an officer in his army, had, presumably a short time
before the composition of this poem, returned to the capital and
was in all likelihood then occupied with the building of his much-
talked-of marble palace furnished with lavish magnificence on
the Caelian hill. The Iberian booty mentioned in the poem must have
reference to Caesar's governorship of Further Spain, and Mamurra
must even then, as certainly afterwards in Gaul, have been found at
Caesar's headquarters; the Pontic booty presumably has reference to
the war of Pompeius against Mithradates, especially as according to
the hint of the poet it was not merely Caesar that enriched Mamurra.

More innocent than this virulent invective, which was bitterly felt
by Caesar (Suet. Caes. 73), is another nearly contemporary poem of
the same author (xi.) to which we may here refer, because with its
pathetic introduction to an anything but pathetic commission it
very cleverly quizzes the general staff of the new regents--the
Gabiniuses, Antoniuses, and such like, suddenly advanced from
the lowest haunts to headquarters. Let it be remembered that it was
written at a time when Caesar was fighting on the Rhine and on
the Thames, and when the expeditions of Crassus to Parthia and of
Gabinius to Egypt were in preparation. The poet, as if he too
expected one of the vacant posts from one of the regents, gives
to two of his clients their last instructions before departure:

-Furi et Aureli, comites Catulli-, etc.

11.  V. VIII. Clodius

12.  In this year the January with 29 and the February with 23 days
were followed by the intercalary month with 28, and then by March.

13.  -Consul- signifies "colleague" (i. 318), and a consul who is
at the same time proconsul is at once an actual consul and
a consul's substitute.

14.  II. III. Military Tribunes with Consular Powers




Notes for Chapter IX

1.  iv. 434

2.  Tigranes was still living in February 698 (Cic. pro Sest. 27,
59); on the other hand Artavasdes was already reigning before 700
(Justin, xlii. 2, 4; Plut. Crass. 49).

3.  V. IV. Ptolemaeus in Egypt Recognized, but Expelled by His Subjects

4.  V. IV. Military Pacification of Syria

5.  V. VII. Repulse of the Helvetii, V. VII. Expeditions against
the Maritime Cantons

6.  V. VII. Cassivellaunus

7.  V. VII. The Carnutes ff.

8.  V. II. Renewal of the War

9.  V. IV. Difficulty with the Parthians

10.  IV. I. War against Aristonicus

11.  V. VII. Insurrection

12.  V. VIII. Humiliation of the Republicans

13.  V. VIII. Changes in the Arrangement of Magistrates and the Jury-System

14.  V. VIII. Humiliation of the Republicans

15.  V. VIII. The Aristocracy Submits ff.

16.  V. VIII. Changes in the Arrangement of Magistrates and the Jury-System

17.  V. VIII. The Senate under the Monarchy

18.  V. II. Mutiny of the Soldiers, V. III. Reappearance of Pompeius

19.  V. VII. Alpine Peoples

20.  V. IX. Dictatorship of Pompeius

21.  -Homo ingeniosissime nequam- (Vellei. ii. 48).

22.  V. IX. Debates as to Caesar's Recall

23.  IV. X. The Restoration

24.  V. II. Beginning of the Armenian War

25.  To be distinguished from the consul having the same name of
704; the latter was a cousin, the consul of 705 a brother, of
the Marcus Marcellus who was consul in 703.

26.  V. IX. Debates ss to Caesar's Recall ff.

27.  II. II. Intercession




Notes for Chapter X

1.  V. V. Transpadanes

2.  V. V. Transpadanes

3.  A centurion of Caesar's tenth legion, taken prisoner, declared
to the commander-in-chief of the enemy that he was ready with ten
of his men to make head against the best cohort of the enemy (500
men; Dell. Afric. 45).  "In the ancient mode of fighting," to quote
the opinion of Napoleon I, "a battle consisted simply of duels;
what was only correct in the mouth of that centurion, would be mere
boasting in the mouth of the modern soldier." Vivid proofs of
the soldierly spirit that pervaded Caesar's army are furnished by
the Reports--appended to his Memoirs--respecting the African and
the second Spanish wars, of which the former appears to have had as its
author an officer of the second rank, while the latter is in every
respect a subaltern camp-journal.

4.  V. IX. Debates as to Caesar's Recall

5.  IV. IX. Fresh Difficulties with Mithradates

6.  V. IV. The New Relations of the Romans in the East, V. IV. Galatia

7.  V. IV. Ptolemaeus in Egypt Recognized, but Expelled by His Subjects

8.  V. VII. Wars and Revolts There

9.  V. IX. Repulse of the Parthians

10.  V. IX. Counter-Arrangements of Caesar

11.  V. VIII. Settlement of the New Monarchial Rule

12.  V. VIII. Changes in the Arrangement of Magistracies
and the Jury-System

13.  This number was specified by Pompeius himself (Caesar, B.C. i.
6), and it agrees with the statement that he lost in Italy about 60
cohorts or 30,000 men, and took 25,000 over to Greece (Caesar, B.C.
iii. 10).

14.  V. VII. With the Bellovaci

15.  The decree of the senate was passed on the 7th January; on
the 18th it had been already for several days known in Rome that Caesar
had crossed the boundary (Cic. ad Att. vii. 10; ix. 10, 4);
the messenger needed at the very least three days from Rome to Ravenna.
According to this the setting out of Caesar falls about the 12th
January, which according to the current reduction corresponds to
the Julian 24 Nov. 704.

16.  IV. IX. Pompeius

17.  IV. XI. Italian Revenues

18.  V. VII. Caesar in Spain

19.  V. VII. Venetian War ff.

20.  III. VI. Scipio Driven Back to the Coast

21.  V. X. Caesar Takes the Offensive

22.  V. VII. Illyria

23.  As according to formal law the "legal deliberative assembly"
undoubtedly, just like the "legal court," could only take place in
the city itself or within the precincts, the assembly representing
the senate in the African army called itself the "three hundred"
(Bell. Afric. 88, 90; Appian, ii. 95), not because it consisted of
300 members, but because this was the ancient normal number of
senators (i. 98).  It is very likely that this assembly recruited
its ranks by equites of repute; but, when Plutarch makes the three
hundred to be Italian wholesale dealers (Cato Min. 59, 61), he
has misunderstood his authority (Bell. Afr. 90).  Of a similar
kind must have been the arrangement as to the quasi-senate
already in Thessalonica.

24.  V. X. Indignation of the Anarchist Party against Caesar

25.  V. X. The Pompeian Army

26.  V. IV. And Brought Back by Gabinius

27.  V. X. Caesar's Fleet and Army in Illyricum Destroyed

28.  According to the rectified calendar on the 5th Nov. 705.

29.  V. X. Result of the Campaign as a Whole

30.  The exact determination of the field of battle is difficult.
Appian (ii. 75) expressly places it between (New) Pharsalus (now
Fersala) and the Enipeus.  Of the two streams, which alone are of
any importance in the question, and are undoubtedly the Apidanus
and Enipeus of the ancients--the Sofadhitiko and the Fersaliti--the
former has its sources in the mountains of Thaumaci (Dhomoko) and
the Dolopian heights, the latter in mount Othrys, and the Fersaliti
alone flows past Pharsalus; now as the Enipeus according to Strabo
(ix. p. 432) springs from mount Othrys and flows past Pharsalus,
the Fersaliti has been most justly pronounced by Leake (Northern
Greece, iv. 320) to be the Enipeus, and the hypothesis followed by
Goler that the Fersaliti is the Apidanus is untenable.  With this
all the other statements of the ancients as to the two rivers
agree.  Only we must doubtless assume with Leake, that the river of
Vlokho formed by the union of the Fersaliti and the Sofadhitiko and
going to the Peneius was called by the ancients Apidanus as well as
the Sofadhitiko; which, however, is the more natural, as while
the Sofadhitiko probably has, the Fersaliti has not, constantly water
(Leake, iv. 321).  Old Pharsalus, from which the battle takes its
name, must therefore have been situated between Fersala and
the Fersaliti.  Accordingly the battle was fought on the left bank of
the Fersaliti, and in such a way that the Pompeians, standing with
their faces towards Pharsalus, leaned their right wing on the river
(Caesar, B. C. iii. 83; Frontinus, Strat. ii. 3, 22).  The camp of
the Pompeians, however, cannot have stood here, but only on
the slope of the heights of Cynoscephalae, on the right bank of
the Enipeus, partly because they barred the route of Caesar to
Scotussa, partly because their line of retreat evidently went over
the mountains that were to be found above the camp towards Larisa;
if they had, according to Leake's hypothesis (iv. 482), encamped to
the east of Pharsalus on the left bank of the Enipeus, they could
never have got to the northward through this stream, which at this
very point has a deeply cut bed (Leake, iv. 469), and Pompeius must
have fled to Lamia instead of Larisa.  Probably therefore
the Pompeians pitched their camp on the right bank of the Fersaliti,
and passed the river both in order to fight and in order, after
the battle, to regain their camp, whence they then moved up the slopes
of Crannon and Scotussa, which culminate above the latter place in
the heights of Cynoscephalae.  This was not impossible.
the Enipeus is a narrow slow-flowing rivulet, which Leake found two
feet deep in November, and which in the hot season often lies quite
dry (Leake, i. 448, and iv. 472; comp. Lucan, vi. 373), and
the battle was fought in the height of summer.  Further the armies
before the battle lay three miles and a half from each other
(Appian, B. C. ii. 65), so that the Pompeians could make all
preparations and also properly secure the communication with their
camp by bridges.  Had the battle terminated in a complete rout, no
doubt the retreat to and over the river could not have been
executed, and doubtless for this reason Pompeius only reluctantly
agreed to fight here.  The left wing of the Pompeians which was
the most remote from the base of retreat felt this; but the retreat at
least of their centre and their right wing was not accomplished in
such haste as to be impracticable under the given conditions.
Caesar and his copyists are silent as to the crossing of the river,
because this would place in too clear a light the eagerness
for battle of the Pompeians apparent otherwise from the whole
narrative, and they are also silent as to the conditions of
retreat favourable for these.

31.  III. VIII. Battle of Cynoscephalae

32.  With this is connected the well-known direction of Caesar to
his soldiers to strike at the faces of the enemy's horsemen.
the infantry--which here in an altogether irregular way acted on
the offensive against cavalry, who were not to be reached with
the sabres--were not to throw their -pila-, but to use them as hand-
spears against the cavalry and, in order to defend themselves
better against these, to thrust at their faces (Plutarch, Pomp. 69,
71; Caes. 45; Appian, ii. 76, 78; Flor. ii. 12; Oros. vi. 15;
erroneously Frontinus, iv. 7, 32).  The anecdotical turn given to
this instruction, that the Pompeian horsemen were to be brought to
run away by the fear of receiving scars in their faces, and that
they actually galloped off "holding their hands before their eyes"
(Plutarch), collapses of itself; for it has point only on
the supposition that the Pompeian cavalry had consisted principally of
the young nobility of Rome, the "graceful dancers"; and this was
not the case (p. 224).  At the most it may be, that the wit of
the camp gave to that simple and judicious military order this very
irrational but certainly comic turn.

33.  V. I. Indefinite and Perilous Character of the Sertorian War

34.  [I may here state once for all that in this and other
passages, where Dr. Mommsen appears incidentally to express views
of religion or philosophy with which I can scarcely be supposed to
agree, I have not thought it right--as is, I believe, sometimes
done in similar cases--to omit or modify any portion of what he has
written.  The reader must judge for himself as to the truth or
value of such assertions as those given in the text.--Tr.]

35.  V. IX. Passive Resistance of Caesar

36.  V. X. The Armies at Pharsalus

37.  V. IV. And Brought Back by Gabinius

38.  V. X. Caesar's Fleet and Army in Illyricum Destroyed

39.  V. IV. Aggregate Results

40.  V. IV. Ptolemaeus in Egypt Recognized, but Expelled
by His Subjects

41.  V. IV. Cyprus Annexed

42.  The loss of the lighthouse-island must have fallen out, where
there is now a chasm (B. A. 12), for the island was in fact at
first in Caesar's power (B. C. iii. 12; B. A. 8).  The mole, must
have been constantly in the power of the enemy, for Caesar held
intercourse with the island only by ships.

43.  V. IV. Robber-Chiefs

44.  V. IV. Robber-Chiefs

45.  V. X. Caesar's Fleet and Army in Illyricum Destroyed

46.  V. VIII. And in the Courts

47.  Much obscurity rests on the shape assumed by the states in
northwestern Africa during this period.  After the Jugurthine war
Bocchus king of Mauretania ruled probably from the western sea
to the port of Saldae, in what is now Morocco and Algiers
(IV. IV. Reorganization of Numidia); the princes of Tingis
(Tangiers)--probably from the outset different from the Mauretanian
sovereigns--who occur even earlier (Plut. Serf. 9), and to whom it may
be conjectured that Sallust's Leptasta (Hist. ii. 31 Kritz) and Cicero's
Mastanesosus (In Vat. 5, 12) belong, may have been independent
within certain limits or may have held from him as feudatories;
just as Syphax already ruled over many chieftains of tribes
(Appian, Pun. 10), and about this time in the neighbouring Numidia
Cirta was possessed, probably however under Juba's supremacy,
by the prince Massinissa (Appian, B. C. iv. 54).  About 672 we find
in Bocchus' stead a king called Bocut or Bogud (iv. 92; Orosius,
v. 21, 14), the son of Bocchus.  From 705 the kingdom appears divided
between king Bogud who possesses the western, and king Bocchus
who possesses the eastern half, and to this the later partition
of Mauretania into Bogud's kingdom or the state of Tingis and Bocchus'
kingdom or the state of Iol (Caesarea) refers (Plin. H. N. v. 2, 19;
comp. Bell. Afric. 23).

48.  IV. IX. Fresh Difficulties with Mithradates

49.  V. V. Resumption of the Conspiracy

50.  V. X. Reorganization of the Coalition In Africa

51.  IV. IV. Reorganization of Numidia

52.  The inscriptions of the region referred to preserve numerous
traces of this colonization.  The name of the Sittii is there
unusually frequent; the African township Milev bears as Roman
the name -colonia Sarnensis-(C. I. L. viii. p. 1094) evidently from
the Nucerian river-god Sarnus (Sueton. Rhet. 4).




Notes for Chapter XI

1.  V. X. Insurrection in Alexandria

2.  The affair with Laberius, told in the well-known prologue, has
been quoted as an instance of Caesar's tyrannical caprices, but
those who have done so have thoroughly misunderstood the irony of
the situation as well as of the poet; to say nothing of
the -naivete- of lamenting as a martyr the poet who readily
pockets his honorarium.

3.  The triumph after the battle of Munda subsequently to be
mentioned probably had reference only to the Lusitanians who served
in great numbers in the conquered army.

4.  Any one who desires to compare the old and new hardships of
authors will find opportunity of doing so in the letter of Caecina
(Cicero, Aa. Fam. vi. 7).

5.  V. VI. Second Coalition of Pompeius, Crassus, and Caesar

6.  When this was written--in the year 1857--no one could foresee
how soon the mightiest struggle and most glorious victory as yet
recorded in human annals would save the United States from this
fearful trial, and secure the future existence of an absolute
self-governing freedom not to be permanently kept in check by
any local Caesarism.

7.  V. IX. Preparation for Attacks on Caesar

8.  On the 26th January 710 Caesar is still called dictator IIII
(triumphal table); on the 18th February of this year he was already
-dictator perpetuus- (Cicero, Philip, ii. 34, 87). Comp.
Staatsrecht, ii. 3 716.

9.  IV. X. Executions

10.  The formulation of that dictatorship appears to have expressly
brought into prominence among other things the "improvement of
morals"; but Caesar did not hold on his own part an office of this
sort (Staatsrecht, ii. 3 705).

11.  Caesar bears the designation of -imperator- always without any
number indicative of iteration, and always in the first place after
his name (Staatsrecht, ii. 3 767, note 1).

12.  V. V. Rehabilitation of Saturninus and Marius

13.  During the republican period the name Imperator, which denotes
the victorious general, was laid aside with the end of the campaign;
as a permanent title it first appears in the case of Caesar.

14.  That in Caesar's lifetime the -imperium- as well as
the supreme pontificate was rendered by a formal legislative act
hereditary for his agnate descendants--of his own body or through
the medium of adoption--was asserted by Caesar the Younger as his
legal title to rule.  As our traditional accounts stand,
the existence of such a law or resolution of the senate must be
decidedly called in question; but doubtless it remains possible
that Caesar intended the issue of such a decree. (Comp,
Staatsrecht, ii. 3 787, 1106.)

15.  The widely-spread opinion, which sees in the imperial office
of Imperator nothing but the dignity of general of the empire
tenable for life, is not warranted either by the signification of
the word or by the view taken by the old authorities.  -Imperium-
is the power of command, -Imperator- is the possessor of that
power; in these words as in the corresponding Greek terms --kratos--,
--autokrator-- so little is there implied a specific military
reference, that it is on the contrary the very characteristic of
the Roman official power, where it appears purely and completely,
to embrace in it war and process--that is, the military and
the civil power of command--as one inseparable whole.  Dio says quite
correctly (liii. 17; comp, xliii. 44; lii. 41) that the name
Imperator was assumed by the emperors "to indicate their full power
instead of the title of king and dictator (--pros deilosin teis
autotelous sphon exousias, anti teis basileos tou te diktatoros
epikleiseos--); for these other older titles disappeared in name,
but in reality the title of Imperator gives the same prerogatives
(--to de dei ergon auton tei tou autokratoros proseigoria
bebaiountai--), for instance the right of levying soldiers,
imposing taxes, declaring war and concluding peace, exercising
the supreme authority over burgess and non-burgess in and out of
the city and punishing any one at any place capitally or otherwise, and
in general of assuming the prerogatives connected in the earliest
times with the supreme imperium." It could not well be said in
plainer terms, that Imperator is nothing at all but a synonym for
rex, just as imperare coincides with regere.

16.  When Augustus in constituting the principate resumed
the Caesarian imperium, this was done with the restriction that it
should be limited as to space and in a certain sense also as to
time; the proconsular power of the emperors, which was nothing but
just this imperium, was not to come into application as regards
Rome and Italy (Staatsrecht, ii. 8 854).  On this element rests
the essential distinction between the Caesarian imperium and
the Augustan principate, just as on the other hand the real equality of
the two institutions rests on the imperfection with which even in
principle and still more in practice that limit was realized.

17.  II. I. Collegiate Arrangements

18.  On this question there may be difference of opinion, whereas
the hypothesis that it was Caesar's intention to rule the Romans as
Imperator, the non-Romans as Rex, must be simply dismissed.  It is
based solely on the story that in the sitting of the senate in
which Caesar was assassinated a Sibylline utterance was brought
forward by one of the priests in charge of the oracles, Lucius
Cotta, to the effect that the Parthians could only be vanquished by
a "king," and in consequence of this the resolution was adopted to
commit to Caesar regal power over the Roman provinces.  This story
was certainly in circulation immediately after Caesar's death.  But
not only does it nowhere find any sort of even indirect
confirmation, but it is even expressly pronounced false by
the contemporary Cicero (De Div. ii. 54, 119) and reported by the later
historians, especially by Suetonius (79) and Dio (xliv. 15) merely
as a rumour which they are far from wishing to guarantee; and it is
under such circumstances no better accredited by the fact of
Plutarch (Caes. 60, 64; Brut. 10) and Appian (B. C. ii. 110)
repeating it after their wont, the former by way of anecdote,
the latter by way of causal explanation.  But the story is not merely
unattested; it is also intrinsically impossible.  Even leaving out
of account that Caesar had too much intellect and too much
political tact to decide important questions of state after
the oligarchic fashion by a stroke of the oracle-machinery, he could
never think of thus formally and legally splitting up the state
which he wished to reduce to a level.

19.  II. III. Union of the Plebeians

20.  II. I. The New Community

21.  IV. X. Abolition of the Censorial Supervision of the Senate

22.  According to the probable calculation formerly assumed (iv.
113), this would yield an average aggregate number of from 1000
to 1200 senators.

23.  This certainly had reference merely to the elections for
the years 711 and 712 (Staatsrecht, ii. a 730); but the arrangement was
doubtless meant to become permanent.

24.  I. V. The Senate as State-Council, II. I. Senate

25.  V. X. Pacification of Alexandria

26.  V. VIII. Changes in the Arrangement of Magistracies
and the Jury-System

27.  I. V. The King

28.  Hence accordingly the cautious turns of expression on
the mention of these magistracies in Caesar's laws; -cum censor aliusve
quis magistratus Romae populi censum aget (L. Jul. mun. l. 144);
praetor isve quei Romae iure deicundo praerit (L. Rubr. often);
quaestor urbanus queive aerario praerit- (L. Jul. mun. l. 37 et al.).

29.  V. III. New Arrangement as to Jurymen

30.  V. VIII. And in the Courts

31.  -Plura enim multo-, says Cicero in his treatise De Oratore
(ii. 42, 178), primarily with reference to criminal trials,
-homines iudicant odio aut amore aut cupiditate aut iracundia aut
dolore aut laetitia aut spe aut timore aut errore aut aliqua
permotione mentis, quam veritate aut praescripto aut iuris norma
aliqua aut iudicii formula aut legibus-.  On this accordingly are
founded the further instructions which he gives for advocates
entering, on their profession.

32.  V. VIII. And in the Courts

33.  V. VII. Macedonia ff.

34.  V. VII. The Gallic Plan of War

35.  V. III. Overthrow of the Senatorial Rule, and New Power of Pompeius

36.  With the nomination of a part of the military tribunes by
the burgesses (III. XI. Election of Officers in the Comitia) Caesar--
in this also a democrat--did not meddle.

37.  V. VII. The New Dacian Kingdom

38.  IV. VI. Political Significance of the Marian Military Reform

39.  IV. VI. Political Significance of the Marian Military Reform

40.  V. V. Total Defeat of the Democratic Party

41.  Varro attests the discontinuance of the Sicilian -decumae-
in a treatise published after Cicero's death (De R. R. 2 praef.)
where he names--as the corn--provinces whence Rome derives her
subsistence--only Africa and Sardinia, no longer Sicily.
The -Latinitas-, which Sicily obtained, must thus doubtless have
included this immunity (comp. Staatsrecht, iii. 684).

42.  V. X. Field of Caesar's Power

43.  III. XI. Italian Subjects

44.  V. VIII. Clodius

45.  III. XIII. Increase of Amusements

46.  In Sicily, the country of production, the -modius- was sold
within a few years at two and at twenty sesterces; from this we may
guess what must have been the fluctuations of price in Rome, which
subsisted on transmarine corn and was the seat of speculators.

47.  IV. XII. The Finances and Public Buildings

48.  It is a fact not without interest that a political writer of
later date but much judgment, the author of the letters addressed
in the name of Sallust to Caesar, advises the latter to transfer
the corn-distribution of the capital to the several -municipia-.
There is good sense in the admonition; as indeed similar ideas
obviously prevailed in the noble municipal provision for
orphans under Trajan.

49.  V. XI. The State-Hierarchy

50.  III. XII. The Management of the Land and Its Capital

51.  The following exposition in Cicero's treatise De officiis
(i. 42) is characteristic: -Iam de artificiis et quaestibus, qui
liberales habendi, qui sordidi sint, kaec fere accepimus.  Primum
improbantur ii quaestus, qui in odia hominum incurrunt, ut
portitorum, ut feneratorum.  Illiberales autem et sordidi quaestus
mercenariorum omnium, quorum operae, nonaries emuntur.  Est autem
in illis ipsa merces auctoramentum servitutis.  Sordidi etiam
putandi, qui mercantur a mercatoribus quod statim vendant, nihil
enim proficiant, nisi admodum mentiantur.  Nec vero est quidquam
turpius vanitate.  Opificesque omnes in sordida arte versantur; nec
enim quidquam ingenuum habere potest officina.  Minimeque artes eae
probandae, quae ministrae sunt voluptatum,

"Cetarii, lanii, coqui, fartores, piscatores,"

ut ait Terentius.  Adde huc, si placet, unguentarios, saltatores,
totumque ludum talarium.  Quibus autem artibus aut prudentia maior
inest, aut non mediocris utilitas quaeritur, ut medicina, ut
architectura, ut doctrina rerum honestarum, eae sunt iis, quorum
ordini conveniunt, honestae.  Mercatura autem, si tenuis est,
sordida putanda est; sin magna et copiosa, multa undique apportans,
multaque sine vanitate impertiens, non est admodum vituperanda;
atque etiam, si satiata quaestu, vel contenta potius; ut saepe ex
alto in portum, ex ipso portu in agros se possessionesque
contulerit, videtur optimo iure posse laudari.  Omnium autem rerum,
ex quibus aliquid acquiritur, nihil est agricultura melius, nihil
uberius, nihil dulcius, nihil homine libero dignius-.  According to
this the respectable man must, in strictness, be a landowner;
the trade of a merchant becomes him only so far as it is a means to
this ultimate end; science as a profession is suitable only for
the Greeks and for Romans not belonging to the ruling classes, who by
this means may purchase at all events a certain toleration of their
personal presence in genteel circles.  It is a thoroughly developed
aristocracy of planters, with a strong infusion of mercantile
speculation and a slight shading of general culture.

52.  IV. IV. Administration under the Restoration

53.  We have still (Macrobius, Hi, 13) the bill of fare of
the banquet which Mucius Lentulus Niger gave before 691 on entering on
his pontificate, and of which the pontifices--Caesar included--the
Vestal Virgins, and some other priests and ladies nearly related to
them partook.  Before the dinner proper came sea-hedgehogs; fresh
oysters as many as the guests wished; large mussels; sphondyli;
fieldfares with asparagus; fattened fowls; oyster and mussel
pasties; black and white sea-acorns; sphondyli again; glycimarides;
sea-nettles; becaficoes; roe-ribs; boar's-ribs; fowls dressed with
flour; becaficoes; purple shell-fish of two sorts.  The dinner
itself consisted of sow's udder; boar's-head; fish-pasties; boar-
pasties; ducks; boiled teals; hares; roasted fowls; starch-pastry;
Pontic pastry.

These are the college-banquets regarding which Varro (De R. R. iii.
2, 16) says that they forced up the prices of all delicacies.
Varro in one of his satires enumerates the following as the most
notable foreign delicacies: peacocks from Samos; grouse from
Phrygia; cranes from Melos; kids from Ambracia; tunny fishes from
Chalcedon; muraenas from the Straits of Gades; bleak-fishes
(? -aselli-) from Pessinus; oysters and scallops from Tarentum;
sturgeons (?) from Rhodes; -scarus--fishes (?) from Cilicia; nuts
from Thasos; dates from Egypt; acorns from Spain.

54.  IV. VII. Economic Crisis, IV. IX. Death of Cinna

55.  III. X. Greek National Party

56.  IV. XI. Capitalist Oligarchy

57.  III. XIII. Luxury

58.  IV. XII. Practical Use Made of Religion

59.  III. XIII. Cato's Family Life, iv. 186 f.

60.  IV. I. Achaean War

61.  IV. XII. Mixture of Peoples

62.  V. VI. Caesar's Agrarian Law

63.  V. XI. Dolabella

64.  This is not stated by our authorities, but it necessarily
follows from the permission to deduct the interest paid by cash or
assignation (-si quid usurae nomine numeratum aut perscriptum
fuisset-; Sueton. Caes. 42), as paid contrary to law, from the capital.

65.  II. III. Laws Imposing Taxes

66.  V. V. Preparations of the Anarchists in Etruria

67.  IV. VII. Economic Crisis

68.  The Egyptian royal laws (Diodorus, i. 79) and likewise
the legislation of Solon (Plutarch, Sol. 13, 15) forbade bonds in which
the loss of the personal liberty of the debtor was made the penalty
of non-payment; and at least the latter imposed on the debtor in
the event of bankruptcy no more than the cession of his whole assets.

69.  I. XI. Manumission

70.  II. III. Continued Distress

71.  At least the latter rule occurs in the old Egyptian royal laws
(Diodorus, i. 79).  On the other hand the Solonian legislation
knows no restrictions on interest, but on the contrary expressly
allows interest to be fixed of any amount at pleasure.

72.  V. VI. Caesar's Agrarian Law

73.  V. VI. Caesar's Agrarian Law

74.  IV. II. Tribunate of Gracchus, IV. II. The Domain Question Viewed
in Itself, IV. IV. The Domain Question under the Restoration

75.  IV. XII. Carneades at Rome, V. III. Continued Subsistence
of the Sullan Constitution

76.  IV. X. The Roman Municipal System

77.  Of both laws considerable fragments still exist.

78.  V. XI. Diminution of the Proletariate

79.  V. VII. Gaul Subdued

80.  As according to Caesar's ordinance annually sixteen
propraetors and two proconsuls divided the governorships among
them, and the latter remained two years in office (p. 344), we
might conclude that he intended to bring the number of provinces in
all up to twenty.  Certainty is, however, the less attainable as to
this, seeing that Caesar perhaps designedly instituted fewer
offices than candidatures.

81.  This is the so-called "free embassy" (-libera legatio-), namely
an embassy without any proper public commission entrusted to it.

82.  V. II. Piracy

83.  V. XI. In The Administration of the Capital

84.  V. XI. Foreign Mercenaries

85.  V. IX. In the Governorships

86.  V. XI. Financial Reforms of Caesar

87.  V. I. Organizations of Sertorius

88.  V. XI. Robberies and Damage by War

89.  V. XI. The Roman Capitalists in the Provinces

90.  V. I. Transpadanes, V. VIII. Settlement of the New Monarchial Rule

91.  Narbo was called the colony of the Decimani, Baeterrae of
the Septimani, Forum Julii of the Octavani, Arelate of the Sextani,
Arausio of the Secundani.  The ninth legion is wanting, because it
had disgraced its number by the mutiny of Placentia (p. 246).  That
the colonists of these colonies belonged to the legions from which
they took their names, is not stated and is not credible;
the veterans themselves were, at least the great majority of them,
settled in Italy (p. 358).  Cicero's complaint, that Caesar "had
confiscated whole provinces and districts at a blow" (De Off. ii.
7, 27; comp. Philipp. xiii. 15, 31, 32) relates beyond doubt, as
its close connection with the censure of the triumph over
the Massiliots proves, to the confiscations of land made on account of
these colonies in the Narbonese province and primarily to
the losses of territory imposed on Massilia.

92.  IV. VII. Bestowal of Latin Rights on the Italian Celts

93.  V. XI. Other Magistracies and Attributions

94.  We are not expressly informed from whom the Latin rights of
the non-colonized townships of this region and especially of
Nemausus proceeded.  But as Caesar himself (B. C. i. 35) virtually
states that Nemausus up to 705 was a Massiliot village; as
according to Livy's account (Dio, xli. 25; Flor. ii. 13; Oros. vi.
15) this very portion of territory was taken from the Massiliots by
Caesar; and lastly as even on pre-Augustan coins and then in Strabo
the town appears as a community of Latin rights, Caesar alone can
have been the author of this bestowal of Latinity.  As to Ruscino
(Roussillon near Perpignan) and other communities in Narbonese Gaul
which early attained a Latin urban constitution, we can only
conjecture that they received it contemporarily with Nemausus.

95.  V. VII. Indulgence toward Existing Arrangements

96.  II. V. Crises within the Romano-Latin League

97.  V. X. The Leaders of the Republicans Put to Death

98.  That no community of full burgesses had more than limited
jurisdiction, is certain.  But the fact, which is distinctly
apparent from the Caesarian municipal ordinance for Cisalpine Gaul,
is a surprising one--that the processes lying beyond municipal
competency from this province went not before its governor, but
before the Roman praetor; for in other cases the governor is in his
province quite as much representative of the praetor who
administers justice between burgesses as of the praetor who
administers justice between burgess and non-burgess, and is
thoroughly competent to determine all processes.  Beyond doubt this
is a remnant of the arrangement before Sulla, under which in
the whole continental territory as far as the Alps the urban
magistrates alone were competent, and thus all the processes there,
where they exceeded municipal competency, necessarily came before
the praetors in Rome.  In Narbo again, Gades, Carthage, Corinth,
the processes in such a case went certainly to the governor
concerned; as indeed even from practical considerations
the carrying of a suit to Rome could not well be thought of.

99.  It is difficult to see why the bestowal of the Roman franchise
on a province collectively, and the continuance of a provincial
administration for it, should be usually conceived as contrasts
excluding each other.  Besides, Cisalpine Gaul notoriously obtained
the -civitas- by the Roscian decree of the people of the 11th March
705, while it remained a province as long as Caesar lived and was
only united with Italy after his death (Dio, xlviii. 12);
the governors also can be pointed out down to 711.  The very fact that
the Caesarian municipal ordinance never designates the country as
Italy, but as Cisalpine Gaul, ought to have led to the right view.

100.  IV. II. The First Sicilian Slave War

101.  The continued subsistence of the municipal census-authorities
speaks for the view, that the local holding of the census had
already been established for Italy in consequence of the Social war
(Staatsrecht, ii. 8 368); but probably the carrying out of this
system was Caesar's work.

102.  II. VII. Intermediate Fuctionaries, III. III. Autonomy

103.  III. XI. Supervision of the Senate Over the Provinces
and Their Governors

104.  I. XI. Character of the Roman Law

105.  IV. XIII. Philology

106.  I. XI. Clients and Foreigners

107.  V. XI. Usury Laws

108.  V. V. Transpadanes

109.  I. XIV. Italian Measures ff.

110.  III. XII. Coins and Moneys

111.  Weights recently brought to light at Pompeii suggest
the hypothesis that at the commencement of the imperial period
alongside of the Roman pound the Attic mina (presumably in
the ratio of 3: 4) passed current as a second imperial weight
(Hermes, xvi. 311).

112.  The gold pieces, which Sulla (iv. 179) and contemporarily
Pompeius caused to be struck, both in small quantity, do not
invalidate this proposition; for they probably came to be taken
solely by weight just like the golden Phillippei which were in
circulation even down to Caesar's time.  They are certainly
remarkable, because they anticipate the Caesarian imperial gold
just as Sulla's regency anticipated the new monarchy.

113.  IV. XI. Token-Money

114.  It appears, namely, that in earlier times the claims of
the state-creditors payable in silver could not be paid against their
will in gold according to its legal ratio to silver; whereas it
admits of no doubt, that from Caesar's time the gold piece had to
be taken as a valid tender for 100 silver sesterces.  This was just
at that time the more important, as in consequence of the great
quantities of gold put into circulation by Caesar it stood for
a time in the currency of trade 25 per cent below the legal ratio.

115.  There is probably no inscription of the Imperial period,
which specifies sums of money otherwise than in Roman coin.

116.  Thus the Attic -drachma-, although sensibly heavier than
the -denarius-, was yet reckoned equal to it; the -tetradrachmon- of
Antioch, weighing on an average 15 grammes of silver, was made
equal to 3 Roman -denarii-, which only weigh about 12 grammes;
the -cistophorus- of Asia Minor was according to the value of silver
above 3, according to the legal tariff =2 1/2 -denarii-; the Rhodian
half -drachma- according to the value of silver=3/4, according to
the legal tariff = 5/8 of a -denarius-, and so on.

117.  III. III. Illyrian Piracy

118.  The identity of this edict drawn up perhaps by Marcus Flavius
(Macrob. Sat. i. 14, 2) and the alleged treatise of Caesar, De
Stellis, is shown by the joke of Cicero (Plutarch, Caes. 59) that
now the Lyre rises according to edict.

We may add that it was known even before Caesar that the solar year
of 365 days 6 hours, which was the basis of the Egyptian calendar,
and which he made the basis of his, was somewhat too long.
the most exact calculation of the tropical year which the ancient world
was acquainted with, that of Hipparchus, put it at 365 d. 5 h. 52'
12"; the true length is 365 d. 5 h. 48' 48".

119.  Caesar stayed in Rome in April and Dec. 705, on each occasion
for a few days; from Sept. to Dec. 707; some four months in the autumn
of the year of fifteen months 708, and from Oct. 709 to March 710.




Notes for Chapter XII

1.  V. VIII. Clodius

2.  III. XIV. Cato's Encyclopedia

3.  These form, as is well known, the so-called seven liberal arts,
which, with this distinction between the three branches of
discipline earlier naturalized in Italy and the four subsequently
received, maintained their position throughout the middle ages.

4.  IV. XII. Latin Instruction

5.  Thus Varro (De R. R. i. 2) says: -ab aeditimo, ut dicere
didicimus a patribus nostris; ut corrigimur ab recenlibus
urbanis, ab aedituo-.

6.  The dedication of the poetical description of the earth which
passes under the name of Scymnus is remarkable in reference to
those relations.  After the poet has declared his purpose of
preparing in the favourite Menandrian measure a sketch of geography
intelligible for scholars and easy to be learned by heart, he
dedicates--as Apollodorus dedicated his similar historical
compendium to Attalus Philadelphus king of Pergamus

   --athanaton aponemonta dexan Attalo
   teis pragmateias epigraphein eileiphoti-- --

his manual to Nicomedes III king (663?-679) of Bithynia:

--ego d' akouon, dioti ton non basileon
monos basilikein chreistoteita prosphereis
peiran epethumeis autos ep' emautou labein
kai paragenesthai kai ti basileus est' idein,
dio tei prothesei sumboulon exelexamein
... ton Apollena ton Didumei...
ou dei schedon malista kai pepeismenos
pros sein kata logon eika (koinein gar schedon
tois philomathousin anadedeichas) estian--.

7.  IV. XIII. Historical Composition

8.  V. XII. Greek Instruction

9.  Cicero testifies that the mime in his time had taken the place
of the Atellana (Ad Fam. ix. 16); with this accords the fact, that
the -mimi- and -mimae- first appear about the Sullan epoch (Ad Her.
i. 14, 24; ii. 13, 19; Atta Fr. 1 Ribbeck; Plin. H. N. vii. 43,
158; Plutarch, Sull. 2, 36).  The designation -mimus-, however, is
sometimes inaccurately applied to the comedian generally.  Thus
the -mimus- who appeared at the festival of Apollo in 542-543 (Festus
under -salva res est-; comp. Cicero, De Orat. ii. 59, 242) was
evidently nothing but an actor of the -palliata-, for there was at
this period no room in the development of the Roman theatre for
real mimes in the later sense.

With the mimus of the classical Greek period--prose dialogues,
in which -genre- pictures, particularly of a rural kind, were
presented--the Roman mimus had no especial relation.

10.  With the possession of this sum, which constituted
the qualification for the first voting-class and subjected
the inheritance to the Voconian law, the boundary line was crossed
which separated the men of slender means (-tenuiores-) from
respectable people.  Therefore the poor client of Catullus
(xxiii. 26) beseeches the gods to help him to this fortune.

11.  In the "Descensus ad Inferos" of Laberius all sorts of people
come forward, who have seen wonders and signs; to one there
appeared a husband with two wives, whereupon a neighbour is of
opinion that this is still worse than the vision, recently seen by
a soothsayer in a dream, of six aediles.  Caesar forsooth desired--
according to the talk of the time--to introduce polygamy in Rome
(Suetonius, Caes. 82) and he nominated in reality six aediles
instead of four.  One sees from this that aberius understood
how to exercise the fool's privilege and Caesar how to permit
the fool's freedom.

12.  V. VIII. Attempts of the Regents to Check It

13.  V. XI. The Poor

14.  IV. XIII. Dramatic Arrangements

15.  He obtained from the state for every day on which he acted
1000 -denarii- (40 pounds) and besides this the pay for his
company.  In later years he declined the honorarium for himself.

16.  Such an individual apparent exception as Panchaea the land of
incense (ii. 417) is to be explained from the circumstance that
this had passed from the romance of the Travels of Euhemerus
already perhaps into the poetry of Ennius, at any rate into
the poems of Lucius Manlius (iv. 242; Plin. H. N. x. a, 4) and thence
was well known to the public for which Lucretius wrote.

17.  III. XIV. Moral Effect of Tragedy

18.  This naively appears in the descriptions of war, in which
the seastorms that destroy armies, and the hosts of elephants that
trample down those who are on their own side--pictures, that is,
from the Punic wars--appear as if they belong to the immediate
present. Comp. ii. 41; v. 1226, 1303, 1339.

19.  "No doubt," says Cicero (Tusc. iii. 19, 45) in reference to
Ennius, "the glorious poet is despised by our reciters of
Euphorion." "I have safely arrived," he writes to Atticus (vii. 2
init.), "as a most favourable north wind blew for us across from
Epirus.  This spondaic line you may, if you choose, sell to one of
the new-fashioned poets as your own" (-ita belle nobis flavit ab
Epiro lenissumus Onchesmites. Hunc- --spondeiazonta-- -si cui voles
--ton neoteron-- pro tuo vendito-).

20.  V. VIII. Literature of the Opposition

21.  "For me when a boy," he somewhere says, "there sufficed
a single rough coat and a single under-garment, shoes without
stockings, a horse without a saddle; I had no daily warm bath, and
but seldom a river-bath." On account of his personal valour he
obtained in the Piratic war, where he commanded a division of
the fleet, the naval crown.

22.  V. X. The Pompeians in Spain

23.  There is hardly anything more childish than Varro's scheme of
all the philosophies, which in the first place summarily declares
all systems that do not propose the happiness of man as their
ultimate aim to be nonexistent, and then reckons the number of
philosophies conceivable under this supposition as two hundred and
eighty-eight.  The vigorous man was unfortunately too much a scholar
to confess that he neither could nor would be a philosopher,
and accordingly as such throughout life he performed a blind dance-
not altogether becoming--between the Stoa, Pythagoreanism, and Diogenism.

24.  On one occasion he writes, "-Quintiforis Clodii foria ac
poemata ejus gargaridians dices; O fortuna, O fors fortuna-!" And
elsewhere, "-Cum Quintipor Clodius tot comoedias sine ulla fecerit
Musa, ego unum libellum non 'edolem' ut ait Ennius?-" This not
otherwise known Clodius must have been in all probability
a wretched imitator of Terence, as those words sarcastically laid
at his door "O fortuna, O fors fortuna!" are found occurring
in a Terentian comedy.

The following description of himself by a poet in Varro's
 --Onos Louras--,

   -Pacuvi discipulus dicor, porro is fuit Enni,
   Ennius Musarum; Pompilius clueor-

might aptly parody the introduction of Lucretius (p. 474), to whom
Varro as a declared enemy of the Epicurean system cannot have been
well disposed, and whom he never quotes.

25.  He himself once aptly says, that he had no special fondness
for antiquated words, but frequently used them, and that he was
very fond of poetical words, but did not use them.

26.  The following description is taken from the -Marcipor-
("Slave of Marcus"):--

   -Repente noctis circiter meridie
   Cum pictus aer fervidis late ignibus
   Caeli chorean astricen ostenderet,
   Nubes aquali, frigido velo leves
   Caeli cavernas aureas subduxerant,
   Aquam vomentes inferam mortalibus.
   Ventique frigido se ab axe eruperant,
   Phrenetici septentrionum filii,
   Secum ferentes tegulas, ramos, syrus.
   At nos caduci, naufragi, ut ciconiae
   Quarum bipennis fulminis plumas vapor
   Perussit, alte maesti in terram cecidimus-.

In the --'Anthropopolis-- we find the lines:

   -Non fit thesauris, non auro pectu' solutum;
   Non demunt animis curas ac relligiones
   Persarum montes, non atria diviti' Crassi-.

But the poet was successful also in a lighter vein.  In the -Est
Modus Matulae- there stood the following elegant commendation of
wine:--

   -Vino nihil iucundius quisquam bibit.
   Hoc aegritudinem ad medendam invenerunt,
   Hoc hilaritatis dulce seminarium.
   Hoc continet coagulum convivia-.

And in the --Kosmotonounei-- the wanderer returning home thus
concludes his address to the sailors:

   -Delis habenas animae leni,
   Dum nos ventus flamine sudo
   Suavem ad patriam perducit-.

27.  The sketches of Varro have so uncommon historical
and even poetical significance, and are yet, in consequence of
the fragmentary shape in which information regarding them has reached
us, known to so few and so irksome to study, that we may be allowed
to give in this place a resume of some of them with the few
restorations indispensable for making them readable.

The satire Manius (Early Up!) describes the management of a rural
household. "Manius summons his people to rise with the sun, and in
person conducts them to the scene of their work.  The youths make
their own bed, which labour renders soft to them, and supply
themselves with water-jar and lamp.  Their drink is the clear fresh
spring, their fare bread, and onions as relish.  Everything
prospers in house and field.  The house is no work of art; but
an architect might learn symmetry from it.  Care is taken of
the field, that it shall not be left disorderly and waste, or go to
ruin through slovenliness and neglect; in return the grateful Ceres
wards off damage from the produce, that the high-piled sheaves may
gladden the heart of the husbandman.  Here hospitality still holds
good; every one who has but imbibed mother's milk is welcome.
the bread-pantry and wine-vat and the store of sausages on the rafters,
lock and key are at the service of the traveller, and piles of food
are set before him; contented sits the sated guest, looking neither
before nor behind, dozing by the hearth in the kitchen.
the warmest double-wool sheepskin is spread as a couch for him.

"Here people still as good burgesses obey the righteous law, which
neither out of envy injures the innocent, nor out of favour pardons
the guilty.  Here they speak no evil against their neighbours.
Here they trespass not with their feet on the sacred hearth, but
honour the gods with devotion and with sacrifices, throw for
the house-spirit his little bit of flesh into his appointed little
dish, and when the master of the household dies, accompany the bier
with the same prayer with which those of his father and of his
grandfather were borne forth."

In another satire there appears a "Teacher of the Old"
(--Gerontodidaskalos--), of whom the degenerate age seems to stand
more urgently in need than of the teacher of youth, and he explains
how "once everything in Rome was chaste and pious," and now all
things are so entirely changed.  "Do my eyes deceive me, or do I
see slaves in arms against their masters?--Formerly every one who
did not present himself for the levy, was sold on the part of
the state into slavery abroad; now the censor who allows cowardice and
everything to pass is called [by the aristocracy, III. XI. Separation
Of the Orders in the Theatre; IV. X. Shelving of the Censorship, V. III.
Renewal of the Censorship; V. VIII. Humiliations of the Republicans]
a great citizen, and earns praise because he does not seek
to make himself a name by annoying his fellow-citizens.--
Formerly the Roman husbandman had his beard shaven once every week;
now the rural slave cannot have it fine enough.--Formerly one saw
on the estates a corn-granary, which held ten harvests, spacious
cellars for the wine-vats and corresponding wine-presses; now
the master keeps flocks of peacocks, and causes his doors to be inlaid
with African cypress-wood.--Formerly the housewife turned
the spindle with the hand and kept at the same time the pot on
the hearth in her eye, that the pottage might not be singed; now," it
is said in another satire, "the daughter begs her father for
a pound of precious stones, and the wife her husband for a bushel of
pearls.--Formerly a newly-married husband was silent and bashful;
now the wife surrenders herself to the first coachman that comes.--
Formerly the blessing of children was woman's pride; now if her
husband desires for himseli children, she replies: Knowest thou not
what Ennius says?

   "'-Ter sub armis malim vitam cernere Quam semel modo parere--.--'

"Formerly the wife was quite content, when the husband once or twice
in the year gave her a trip to the country in the uncushioned
waggon;" now, he could add (comp. Cicero, Pro Mil. 21, 55), "the
wife sulks if her husband goes to his country estate without her,
and the travelling lady is attended to the villa by the fashionable
host of Greek menials and the choir." --In a treatise of a graver
kind, "Catus or the Training of Children," Varro not only instructs
the friend who had asked him for advice on that point, regarding
the gods who were according to old usage to be sacrificed to for
the children's welfare, but, referring to the more judicious mode
of rearing children among the Persians and to his own strictly
spent youth, he warns against over-feeding and over-sleeping,
against sweet bread and fine fare--the whelps, the old man thinks,
are now fed more judiciously than the children--and likewise
against the enchantresses' charms and blessings, which in cases of
sickness so often take the place of the physician's counsel.  He
advises to keep the girls at embroidery, that they may afterwards
understand how to judge properly of embroidered and textile work,
and not to allow them to put off the child's dress too early; he
warns against carrying boys to the gladiatorial games, in which
the heart is early hardened and cruelty learned.--In the "Man of Sixty
Years" Varro appears as a Roman Epimenides who had fallen asleep
when a boy of ten and waked up again after half a century.  He is
astonished to find instead of his smooth-shorn boy's head an old
bald pate with an ugly snout and savage bristles like a hedgehog;
but he is still more astonished at the change in Rome.  Lucrine
oysters, formerly a wedding dish, are now everyday fare; for which,
accordingly, the bankrupt glutton silently prepares the incendiary
torch.  While formerly the father disposed of his boy, now
the disposal is transferred to the latter: he disposes, forsooth, of
his father by poison.  The Comitium had become an exchange,
the criminal trial a mine of gold for the jurymen.  No law is any
longer obeyed save only this one, that nothing is given for
nothing.  All virtues have vanished; in their stead the awakened
man is saluted by impiety, perfidy, lewdness, as new denizens.
"Alas for thee, Marcus, with such a sleep and such an awakening!"--
The sketch resembles the Catilinarian epoch, shortly after which
(about 697) the old man must have written it, and there lay a truth
in the bitter turn at the close; where Marcus, properly reproved
for his unseasonable accusations and antiquarian reminiscences, is--
with a mock application of a primitive Roman custom--dragged as
a useless old man to the bridge and thrown into the Tiber.  There was
certainly no longer room for such men in Rome.

28.  "The innocent," so ran a speech, "thou draggest forth,
trembling in every limb, and on the high margin of the river's bank
in the dawn of the morning" [thou causest them to be slaughtered].
Several such phrases, that might be inserted without difficulty in
a commonplace novel, occur.

29.  V. XII. Poems in Prose

30.  V. XII. Catullus

31.  V. XII. Greek Literati in Rome

32.  That the treatise on the Gallic war was published all at once,
has been long conjectured; the distinct proof that it was so, is
furnished by the mention of the equalization of the Boii and
the Haedui already in the first book (c. 28) whereas the Boii still
occur in the seventh (c. 10) as tributary subjects of the Haedui,
and evidently only obtained equal rights with their former masters
on account of their conduct and that of the Haedui in the war
against Vercingetorix.  On the other hand any one who attentively
follows the history of the time will find in the expression as to
the Milonian crisis (vii. 6) a proof that the treatise was published
before the outbreak of the civil war; not because Pompeius is there
praised, but because Caesar there approves the exceptional laws of
702.(p. 146)  This he might and could not but do, so long as he
sought to bring about a peaceful accommodation with Pompeius,( p.
175) but not after the rupture, when he reversed the condemnations
that took place on the basis of those laws injurious for him.(p.
316)  Accordingly the publication of this treatise has been quite
rightly placed in 703.

The tendency of the work we discern most distinctly in
the constant, often--most decidedly, doubtless, in the case of the
Aquitanian expedition (III. XI. The Censorship A Prop of the Nobility)--
not successful, justification of every single act of war as
a defensive measure which the state of things had rendered inevitable.
That the adversaries of Caesar censured his attacks on the Celts
and Germans above all as unprovoked, is well known (Sueton. Caes. 24).

33.  V. XI. Amnesty

34.  V. XII. The New Roman Poetry

35.  V. XI. Caelius and Milo

36.  V. IX. Curio, V. X. Death of Curio

37.  IV. XIII. Sciences

38.  A remarkable example is the general exposition regarding
cattle in the treatise on Husbandry (ii. 1) with the nine times
nine subdivisions of the doctrine of cattle-rearing, with
the "incredible but true" fact that the mares at Olisipo (Lisbon)
become pregnant by the wind, and generally with its singular
mixture of philosophical, historical, and agricultural notices.

39.  Thus Varro derives -facere- from -facies-, because he who
makes anything gives to it an appearance, -volpes-, the fox, after
Stilo from -volare pedibus- as the flying-footed; Gaius Trebatius,
a philosophical jurist of this age, derives -sacellum- from -sacra
cella-, Figulus -frater- from -fere alter- and so forth.  This
practice, which appears not merely in isolated instances but as
a main element of the philological literature of this age, presents
a very great resemblance to the mode in which till recently
comparative philology was prosecuted, before insight into
the organism of language put a stop to the occupation of the empirics.

40.  V. XII. Grammatical Science

41.  V. XI. Sciences of General Culture at This Period

42.  V. XI. Reform of the Calendar

43.  V. XII. Dramatic Spectacles

44.  Such "Greek entertainments" were very frequent not merely in
the Greek cities of Italy, especially in Naples (Cic. pro Arch. 5,
10; Plut. Brut. 21), but even now also in Rome (iv. 192; Cic. Ad
Fam. vii. 1, 3; Ad Att. xvi. 5, 1; Sueton. Caes. 39; Plut. Brut.
21).  When the well-known epitaph of Licinia Eucharis fourteen
years of age, which probably belongs to the end of this period,
makes this "girl well instructed and taught in all arts by
the Muses themselves" shine as a dancer in the private exhibitions of
noble houses and appear first in public on the Greek stage (-modo
nobilium ludos decoravi choro, et Graeca in scaena prima populo
apparui-), this doubtless can only mean that she was the first girl
that appeared on the public Greek stage in Rome; as generally
indeed it was not till this epoch that women began to come forward
publicly in Rome (p. 469).

These "Greek entertainments" in Rome seem not to have been properly
scenic, but rather to have belonged to the category of composite
exhibitions--primarily musical and declamatory--such as were not of
rare occurrence in subsequent times also in Greece (Welcker,
Griech. Trag., p. 1277).  This view is supported by the prominence
of flute-playing in Polybius (xxx. 13) and of dancing in
the account of Suetonius regarding the armed dances from Asia Minor
performed at Caesar's games and in the epitaph of Eucharis;
the description also of the -citharoedus- (Ad Her. iv. 47, 60; comp.
Vitruv. v. 5, 7) must have been derived from such "Greek
entertainments." The combinations of these representations in Rome
with Greek athletic combats is significant (Polyb. l. c.; Liv.
xxxix. 22).  Dramatic recitations were by no means excluded from
these mixed entertainments, since among the players whom Lucius
Anicius caused to appear in 587 in Rome, tragedians are expressly
mentioned; there was however no exhibition of plays in the strict
sense, but either whole dramas, or perhaps still more frequently
pieces taken from them, were declaimed or sung to the flute by
single artists.  This must accordingly have been done also in Rome;
but to all appearance for the Roman public the main matter in these
Greek games was the music and dancing, and the text probably had
little more significance for them than the texts of the Italian
opera for the Londoners and Parisians of the present day.  Those
composite entertainments with their confused medley were far better
suited for the Ionian public, and especially for exhibitions in
private houses, than proper scenic performances in the Greek
language; the view that the latter also took place in Rome cannot
be refuted, but can as little be proved.

45.  V. XI. Sciences of General Culture at This Period



End of Notes for Volume V



TABLE OF CALENDAR EQUIVALENTS

A.U.C.*          B.C.  B.C.             A.U.C.
---------------------------------------------------------------
000              753   753              000
    025          728       750          003
        050      703           725      028
            075  678               700  053
100              653   675              078
    125          628       650          103
        150      603           625      128
            175  578               600  153
200              553   575              178
    225          528       550          203
        250      503           525      228
            275  478               500  253
300              453   475              278
    325          428       450          303
        350      303           425      328
            375  378               400  353
400              353   375              378
    425          328       350          403
        450      303           325      428
            475  278               300  453
500              253   275              478
    525          228       250          503
        550      203           225      528
            575  178               200  553
600              153   175              578
    625          128       150          603
        650      103           125      628
            675  078               100  653
700              053   075              678
    725          028       050          703
        750      003           025      728
            753  000               000  753

*A. U. C.--Ab Urbe Condita (from the founding of the City of Rome)