VI The Growth of the Empire
Ambitionem scriptoris facile auerseris, obtrectatio et liuor pronis auribus accipiuntur quippe adulationi fœdum crimen seruitutis, malignitati falsa species libertatis inest.—Tacitus.
In these words, pregnant and terse as ever, Tacitus gives us a key to the true reading of imperial Roman history. “It is easy,” he says, “to discount the self-interest of the historian and to reject his eulogies, but his malicious criticisms are greedily swallowed. For flattery bears the odious stamp of servility, while malignity wears the false disguise of independence.” Thus out of his own mouth the foremost historian of the early Empire gives us the right to read the literary sources in a spirit favourable to the emperors. So when the historians describe Tiberius as a bloodthirsty tyrant who hid himself away in the island of Capri, and there (at the age of seventy!) began to devote himself to disgusting orgies of lust and cruelty, we shall prefer to reject that story as absurd, and to regard Tiberius as a proud and reserved aristocrat who found it impossible to tolerate the mixture of adulation and spite with which he was treated by the other nobles of Rome, and withdrew from the capital in order to escape it. When Gaius (Caligula) is represented as a lunatic, we merely understand that he was unpopular; when we are told that he made his horse a consul, we recognise a satirist’s humorous exaggeration of his neglect of some noble family’s claims to that office; when we read that he set his army to collect oyster shells on the coast of Normandy, we only conclude that his surrender of the projected invasion of Britain was a subject of ridicule in Rome. Claudius is described as a stupid and clumsy pedant, deformed and inarticulate: in reality he seems to have been a scholar with a leaning towards antiquarian and republican traditions. Even in the case of Nero, the savage ferocity with which he is charged is chiefly due to the fact that his hand lay heavy on the senators. He was undoubtedly popular with the commons, and his real offence was to possess more refinement and culture than was considered proper in a Roman noble, to be too fond of Greeks and art and music. Nevertheless it is impossible to write history in whitewash, and the only safe method of dealing with a period like this is to ignore the personalities on the throne of the Cæsars, and to attempt a broad treatment of the general tendency of these times.
But by neglecting the gossip and the personalities we do, I fear, run the risk of missing much of the interest of the period, and perhaps we lose an important part of the truth. We must not allow ourselves to be wholly deprived of that impression of purple and splendour which hangs about the Golden House of Nero, nor to forget the taint of crime which clings to the palaces of the Cæsars. The latter in particular is an essential part of imperial history. As we have seen, this Empire founded on compromise was and remained illegitimate. The succession was always open to question; there was no law of heredity. This fact was emphasised by the barrenness of the Roman aristocracy. For a hundred years no prince had a son to succeed him, so that the palace was always full of intrigue. Finally, the wickedness of the women is one of the most sinister features of the time. Though it was, indeed, no innovation of the Empire, it now gains a terrible significance in the dynastic conflicts which surrounded the throne. Every one of the early reigns is stained with murders and fearful crimes in the palace. No doubt much of this history is false and malicious. For example, it is by no means likely that Germanicus was poisoned. There were always scandal-mongers to hint at poison when any member of the ruling house died of disease. But even with the most liberal discount for exaggeration, the record is a black one. Let us select two typical stories, in order to suggest the kind of satanic halo which surrounds the imperial houses, as the ancient historians depict them.
Claudius, the conqueror of Britain, was in reality the ablest and best of the Claudian Cæsars who succeeded Augustus, but his wife Messalina, thirty-four years his junior, was a creature of shameless lust and remorseless cruelty. Valerius Asiaticus, a Gaul by birth but now the richest noble of his day, was in possession of the far-famed gardens of Lucullus. Messalina coveted the park and accused him to her husband, with the inevitable result. Asiaticus died like a gentleman. He took his usual exercise, he bathed and dined quite cheerfully, and then he opened his veins, “but not until he had inspected his funeral pyre and ordered its removal to another place, for fear that the smoke should injure the thick foliage of the trees.” So died this lover of gardens. Messalina’s sins grew more open, until at last she went through a public pantomime of marriage with one of her paramours, Silius, a consul-elect. The ceremony was performed before a number of witnesses duly invited. Claudius was at that time guided by the counsels of three Greek secretaries, and one of them determined to reveal the shameful truth to the emperor. Tacitus tells the story of her ruin in graphic language. She was celebrating the vintage feast in the gardens she had wickedly gained for herself. The presses were being trodden, the vats were overflowing, women girt with skins were dancing, as Bacchanals dance in their worship or their frenzy. Messalina with flowing hair shook the thyrsus, and Silius, at her side, crowned with ivy and wearing the buskin, moved his head in time with some lascivious chorus. One of the guests had climbed a tree in sport and reported a “hurricane from Ostia.” It was truer than he knew, for just then messengers began to arrive with news that Claudius was on his way from Ostia, coming with vengeance. The revels ceased, the revellers fled in all directions, and Messalina, left deserted, mounted a garden cart to proceed along the road to meet her husband. Her appeal failed, though Claudius would undoubtedly have relented but for the interference of the freedman Narcissus. After dinner, warmed with the wine, he bade some one go and tell “that poor creature” to come before him on the morrow to plead her cause. But Narcissus had already sent soldiers to her, and she was driven to suicide. “Claudius was still at the banquet when they told him that Messalina was dead, without mentioning whether it was by her own or another’s hand. Nor did he ask the question, but called for his cup and finished the repast as usual.”
Nero, too, in the pages of Suetonius appears so incredible in his wickedness that the exaggeration is obvious. Of his splendid new palace the Golden House we read: “The portico was so high that it could contain a colossal statue of himself a hundred and twenty feet in height; and the space it included was so vast that it had a triple colonnade, a mile in length, and a lake like a sea, surrounded with buildings that looked like a city. It had a park with cornfields, vineyards, pastures, and woods containing a vast number of animals of all kinds, wild and tame. Parts of it were entirely overlaid with gold, and incrusted with jewels and pearl. The supper-rooms were vaulted and the compartments of the ceilings, which were inlaid with ivory, were made to revolve and scatter flowers. They also contained pipes to shed scents upon the guests. The chief banqueting-room was circular and revolved perpetually day and night, according to the motion of the celestial bodies. The baths were supplied with water from the sea and the Albula.” At the dedication of this magnificent building, all that he said in praise of it was: “Now at last I have begun to live like a gentleman.” They charged Nero with the murder of all his relatives, and there is a grim sort of humour in the story of his frequent attempts upon his mother’s life. His grievance against her was that she was too strict. First, he deprived her of her bodyguard, and suborned people to harass her with lawsuits which drove her out of the city. In her retirement he set others to follow her about by land and sea with abuse and scurrilous language. Three times he attempted her life by poison, but finding she had previously rendered herself immune by the use of antidotes, he next designed machinery to make the floor above her bed-chamber collapse while she was asleep. When this failed he constructed a special coffin-ship, which could be made to fall in pieces, and then sent her a loving invitation to visit him at Baiæ, the Brighton of the Romans. The ships of her escort were likewise instructed to ram her by accident on the way home. He attended her to the vessel in a very cheerful spirit and kissed her bosom at parting with her. After which he sat up late at night waiting with great anxiety for the joyful news of her decease. But news arrived that the accident had miscarried, the dowager empress was swimming to shore. When her freedman came joyfully to narrate her escape, Nero pretended that the man had come to assassinate him and ordered her to be put to death. Suetonius adds “on good authority” that he went to view her corpse and criticised her blemishes to his followers, and then called for drink. After this he was haunted by her ghost.
The famous story of his death is told with a little restraint, and the latter part of it is not incredible. When the first bad news came of the revolt of Vindex with the legions of Gaul, Nero summoned his privy council and held a hasty consultation with them about the crisis, but spent the rest of the day in showing them a hydraulic organ and discoursing upon the intricacies of the invention. Then he composed a skit upon the rebels, and prepared a pathetic speech which was to make the mutineers return to his allegiance in tears. He sat down to compose the songs of triumph which should be sung upon that occasion. In preparing his expedition his first thought was to provide carriages for the band: he equipped all his concubines as Amazons with battle-axes and bucklers. But when he heard of the revolt of the Spanish army under Galba also, he fell into a temper and tore the dispatch to pieces. He broke his precious cups and put up a dose of Locusta’s poison in a golden box. He ordered the prætorian guard to rally round him, but they only quoted Vergil to him:
“Is death indeed so hard a lot?”
At midnight he awoke and found that the guards had deserted his bedside. Even his bedding and his golden box of poison had been stolen. So he stumbled out into the night as if he would throw himself into the Tiber. But a few faithful slaves came to him and a freedman offered him his country villa for a refuge, and Nero rode thither in a shabby disguise. An earthquake shook the ground and a flash of lightning darted in his face; he heard the soldiers in the prætorian camp shouting for Galba. Skulking among bushes and briers, he crawled on all fours to a wretched outhouse of his freedman’s villa. There he ordered them to dig a grave and line it with scraps of marble. The water and wood for his obsequies were prepared, while he uttered the famous words “qualis artifex pereo!” either meaning “What an artist the world is losing!” or (more probably) “What an artistic death!” A dispatch came to announce that he had been declared a public enemy by the senate, and was to be punished according to the ancient custom of the Romans. He asked what sort of death that meant, and was informed that the criminal was generally stripped naked and scourged to death with his head in a pillory. Then he took up daggers and tried the points, but still he dared not die. He begged one of his attendants to give him the example. At last he heard the horsemen coming, quoted a line of the Iliad very appropriately, and drove, with the help of his secretary, a dagger into his throat.
Now, even of this, three-quarters is pure rhetoric. For example, it was impossible that Nero should have heard the soldiers in the Esquiline Camp from the road which he took to his servant’s villa. The details are the invention of malice, or the attempt of a literary artist to improve his story. Even Suetonius admits that the populace continued to deck Nero’s tomb with spring and summer flowers, that they dressed up his image and placed it on the rostra as if he were still alive, and that a pretender, who arose in his name twenty years later, was received with acclamation among the Parthians.
Having made this concession to the literary tradition which can be shown to be very largely fiction, we may now endeavour to gather up the fragments of history and briefly trace the progress of the Empire during its first century. First, as to its geographical growth; although Augustus had bequeathed in his testament the advice not to enlarge the frontiers of the Empire, and Tiberius had observed the precept, yet conquest still remained an object of ambition in the heart of every emperor who sought military renown or fresh sources of revenue. Britain, the declined legacy of Julius, was obviously beckoning the Romans. Diplomatic relations with the many kings of that island had always been frequent, and it was found that Britain was an inconvenient neighbour for a rapidly Romanising Gaul. There was a continual coming and going across the water, for there were kindred peoples on each side. Especially, it was the last refuge of the anti-Roman force of Druidism, a religion which was already declining and was suppressed by Claudius in Gaul. That this was so is shown by the forward movement of the Romans in the direction of Anglesey. The details of the conquest of Britain are, in spite of voluminous discussions, by no means certain. Aulus Plautius Silvanus with four legions, and with the future emperor Vespasian as one of his brigadiers, defeated Cymbeline and ten other kings of South Britain, crossed the Thames and conquered Colchester (Camulodunum), which became a Roman colonia and the centre of government. This was in A.D. 43, and Claudius himself spent a fortnight in our island in order to receive the honours of victory. The conquest was not too easily achieved, for there were five great battles in which the emperor, though absent, received the titles of victory. Plautius himself seems to have reached the line of the Trent and Severn. Ostorius Scapula, his successor, was mainly occupied in subduing the Silures of the Welsh mountains, and in the conquest of the elusive prince Caradoc. The mercy shown to that defeated hero proves that the Romans had advanced in humanity since the days of Jugurtha. The two succeeding legates made no fresh advance, but Suetonius Paulinus in A.D. 59-61 established Chester as his western camp. While he was engaged in the conquest of Anglesey, leaving only the ninth legion to hold the conquered province, there broke out the great rebellion under the heroic Boudicca. There never has been a quarrel in this island which has not had money as its root. It was not so much the oppressive nature of the tribute as the vexatious methods of the Roman financiers, who still as in republican days swarmed in the wake of eagles, that stirred the Iceni and their queen into revolt. Camulodunum, Verulamium, and Londinium were taken and sacked and there was an immense slaughter of Roman civilians and Romanised Britons. But vengeance followed: no barbarians could stand against the strategy and discipline of the legions.
Succeeding governors were mainly content to pacify and civilise the island.
One of the extraordinarily pungent chapters of Tacitus shows us the Roman method of empire-building in Britain. “The following winter,” he says of A.D. 79, “was spent in useful statecraft. To make a people which was scattered and barbarous, and therefore prone to warfare, grow accustomed to peace and quietness by way of their pleasures, Agricola used to persuade them by private exhortations and public assistance to build temples, forums, and houses, with praise for the eager and admonitions for the laggard. Thus they could not help embarking on the rivalry for honour. Now he began to instruct the sons of chieftains in the liberal arts, to extol the natural abilities of the Britons above the studious habits of Gaul, so that those who lately rejected even the Roman language now became zealous for oratory. So even our dress came into esteem, and the toga was commonly worn. The next step was towards the attractions of our vices, lounging in colonnades, baths, and refined dinner-parties. They were too ignorant to see that what they call civilisation was really a form of slavery.” There is no doubt that the Britons took as readily as their Gallic cousins to the Roman civilisation. Many of them took Roman names and became Roman citizens. They learnt the pleasures of the bath and the amphitheatre, their mines were exploited, arts and industries were introduced, agriculture was improved. The Druids hid themselves away in the unconquered fastnesses of Wales or crossed over to the Hibernian island which the Romans never had leisure to conquer. Meanwhile the Britons were learning to worship the obsolete gods of Rome, and presently the Eastern deities who came in their train.
It was the father-in-law of Tacitus, Julius Agricola, who conquered, or at least defeated, the northern tribes of England. Among the powerful Brigantes he established a garrison at York (Eburacum), which eventually became the most important of all the Roman centres. He advanced into Scotland also, and inflicted a bloody defeat upon the wild Caledonians. But Scotland remained unconquered, as did the neighbouring island upon which also Agricola had cast his ambitious eyes. The Roman army was wanted elsewhere, and the Emperor Domitian declined to assist any further adventures. Little more of our island’s story is recorded until the travelling Emperor Hadrian came out to visit us in A.D. 122. He saw that the wild north was only to be won by a gradual advance with more or less peaceful penetration northwards. The system of fortified frontiers was already established on the Rhine and Danube, and Hadrian drew his finger across the seventy miles between Bowness and Wallsend. Across this space, where the Tyne and Solway almost overlap, the Roman lines ran straight over hill and dale, and there they are to this day as a silent proof of the greatness of the Roman people.63 This was more than a frontier: it was a vast elongated camp which looked south as well as north and frowned alike upon the Brigantes and the Caledonians. It was pierced at intervals by fortified gates and great roads ran northwards through it. On the north there was first a ditch, and then a stone wall broad enough for two or three men to walk abreast along it and nearly twenty feet high. Behind this, in a space of about 140 yards wide runs a road connecting a chain of fourteen large camps, some of which grew into towns. Southward again was the quadruple rampart of earth, a mound, a dyke, and then a double mound. This immense labour, though it is small in comparison with Roman works elsewhere, was achieved not by British slaves, but by Roman soldiers, some of whom were Britons, some Spaniards, and some Germans. It was completed gradually under various emperors. There were detached forts both north and south of the wall of Hadrian. It was Antoninus Pius who made the next step twenty years later. The Antonine wall from the Forth to the Clyde is only about half as long and of inferior strength. There were camps even north of this, in Stirlingshire for example, and it is clear that the Romans intended to feel their way into the Highlands. But that was contrary to their fates.
Gaul meanwhile was becoming as civilised as Italy herself. Numbers of the Gauls who had acquired the Latin speech received the jus Latinum, which was almost equivalent to full citizenship. Claudius admitted the chiefs of the Ædui into the Roman senate, and part of the speech in which he did so is preserved on bronze tablets at Lyons. Twice in the course of the century there were interesting attempts to give political expression to the Gallic sense of nationality. The revolt of Vindex at the close of Nero’s reign was little more than a mutiny, but the projected “Empire of the Gauls,” which was set up during the confusion which followed the fall of Vitellius, came very near success. Jealousy between the Gauls and Germans wrecked it.
In the case of Germany, it looked for a time as if Tiberius, who, of course, had personal knowledge of the difficulties and advantages of further conquest, meant to break his stepfather’s precept and annex more territory. But probably the annual expeditions of Germanicus were not intended to be more than punitive and demonstrative. Blood enough was shed, and acres enough laid waste, to appease the unburied ghosts of Varus and his legions. But though the great battle of Idistavisus was hailed as a Roman victory, Arminius himself continually eluded the Romans and the legions were more than once in peril of ambush. When Tiberius cried halt, it was open to the critics to find a malevolent explanation in his jealousy of Germanicus, but it is much more likely to have been the deliberate policy of an emperor who had knowledge of Germany. Thus, although Arminius presently fell a victim to his own ambition, and perished by the dagger of a tyrannicide kinsman, he had done his work and saved the liberty of Germany. Henceforth the Romans confined themselves to the Rhine frontier, though they had posts and summer camps beyond it. By degrees the generals of the Upper and Lower Armies in Germany developed into governors of two German provinces, but Germany was unconquered. There was a great military road along the left bank of the Rhine joining the garrison towns where the legions were quartered. Mogontiacum (Mainz) and Vetera Castra (Xanten) remained as the head-quarters, until the latter was superseded by Cologne (Colonia Agrippinensis) founded under Claudius. Trier (Augusta Treverorum), another foundation of about the same date, grew into an important centre of Roman civilisation, as its majestic Roman gate64 and fine amphitheatre still bear witness. Under Claudius also the great Via Claudia over the Brenner Pass was completed, and the canal joining the Maas to the Rhine. This was better work for Roman soldiers than slaughtering Chatti and Chauci in their native forests. The re-entrant angle of the Rhine and Danube about the Black Forest, where the rivers run small, was recognised as a danger-point. The barbarian Germans were accordingly cleared away to make room for a body of Gallic emigrants, who received lands on condition of paying a tithe of their produce as rent, and of undertaking their own defence. This was a new piece of frontier policy which was often imitated in later times.
It seems to have been the Flavian emperors, Vespasian and Domitian, who advanced a step farther. On the other side of the Rhine and beyond these Agri Decumates the Romans began to construct a line of forts and wooden watch-towers linked by a rampart of earth, and known as the Limes Trans-Rhenanus. This frontier of Upper Germany left the Rhine between Linz and Andernach, crossed the Lahn at Ems, and then turned eastwards north of Wiesbaden (Aquæ Mattiacæ) and Frankfort. After Saalburg it runs on a north-easterly curve to Gruningen, whence it turns south, and continues for more than 100 miles through Aschaffenburg and Worth to join the Rhætian limes at Lorch. From Lorch the Rhætian limes goes eastwards to join the Danube a few miles above Regensburg. At first perhaps it was little more than a police and customs limit, but it gradually grew into a formidable barrier behind which the Roman Empire rested in a too profound security. Trajan continued it. Hadrian strengthened it with a wall and palisade. Commodus further fortified and extended it. A similar bulwark ran along the Danube.
This policy of setting up immobile defences like the Great Wall of China is always a dangerous one. Useful at first and visibly strong, it tends to lull the defenders into a false security. The camps and forts grew into towns, the armies into peaceful citizens living with their wives and children and devoting themselves to trade and husbandry. Meanwhile the barbarians on the other side were growing stronger and learning the art of war as fast as the Romans were forgetting it.
After this the danger-point for the Empire shifted gradually eastwards down the Danube. Claudius had converted Thrace from an allied kingdom into a Roman province in A.D. 46. Much difficulty was caused by the Dacians, who lived just across the Danube on the north bank opposite the Roman province of Mœsia and in the modern Roumania. As the Danube was apt to become frozen in winter it ceased to offer a satisfactory frontier, so long as there were powerful enemies on the other side. At first the Romans tried the system of transplanting them, 50,000 under Augustus and 100,000 under Nero, and settling them in the province of Mœsia. But it was a stupid policy, for it meant constant intrigues between the free barbarians and their enslaved kinsfolk. Vespasian accordingly moved two legions down from Dalmatia to reinforce the two already stationed in Mœsia. But presently there arose an able and heroic king called Decebalus, who welded the Dacians into a compact and organised kingdom, and began to menace the security of the Empire. Like Marbod of Bohemia, he drilled his barbarians on the Roman model. In A.D. 85 he invaded Mœsia, won victories and did great damage. Domitian, called upon to face this peril, was content with inflicting a single defeat upon them and then accepting Decebalus as a client prince. He gave him Roman engineers and artillerymen, and even sent gifts of money which the barbarians were pleased to regard as tribute. This has been set down as cowardice, but it was certainly unwisdom in Domitian, for Decebalus grew stronger and more dangerous. It was left for Trajan, the greatest soldier of all the early emperors, to face this thorny problem in the two great Dacian Wars of 101 and 105 B.C. The whole war is depicted for us by pictures in stone. The spiral reliefs which cover the column of Trajan tell us, with far more detail than the narrative of Dio, the history of the two Dacian Wars. We see the embarkation of the Roman army, we see it on the march with its scouts in advance, we see the solemn purifications, sacrifices, and harangues which preceded battle. We see the battles themselves, in which the Romans with sword and pilum defeat the Dacians and their mail-clad Sarmatian cavalry. The great bridge built across the Danube at Viminacium by the Greek architect Apollodorus is faithfully depicted. We can watch the siege of the Dacian capital, Sarmizegethusa, and observe the construction of the siege-engines. Scenes of pathos are most graphically portrayed, the torturing of Roman prisoners by the barbarian women, the suicide of the Dacian chiefs by poison, and the death of the heroic Decebalus. At intervals throughout the story there appears and reappears the calm and stately figure of Trajan, steering his ship, sacrificing for victory, leading the march or the charge, haranguing his troops, directing the labour of engineering, consulting with his officers, or receiving the submission of the foe.65
The end of the two wars was that Dacia was annexed and became a province of the Empire. Here, as elsewhere, Trajan showed his contempt of natural frontiers. As a gallant soldier himself, he believed in the invincibility of the Roman arms, and preferred to put his trust in legions rather than in walls. For this he has been condemned by modern historians, but history is on his side. More than anything else it was reliance on natural frontiers and artificial ramparts, with the consequent loss of military instincts, which was to be the undoing of the Roman Empire.
On the eastern frontier it was for a long time a game of tug-of-war between Rome and Parthia, the rope being supplied by the kingdom of Armenia. The Augustan policy of filling the oriental thrones with princes trained at Rome was not a great success. You might learn bad lessons at court; you might even learn to know Rome without learning to love or fear her. The princes sent to Armenia or Parthia were unstable allies and the ordinary course of events was for the Romans to send out a king to Armenia and for the Parthians to depose him. Again it was left for Trajan to attack this problem in the old Roman fashion; when the usual submissive embassy arrived, Trajan answered, as a Metellus might have done, that he wanted deeds not words, and he led his army on. Trajan found the Eastern legions, whose headquarters were at Antioch, already civilianised and orientalised so that they had become useless for fighting. At this time there were four legions in Syria, one in Judæa and one in the new province of Cappadocia. The first task was to restore discipline and energy to these troops. Then, without bloodshed, in A.D. 115 Armenia was declared a province. Parthia, distracted by civil war, was overrun, its capital Ctesiphon easily taken by siege. Mesopotamia was made a province, and to Parthia was given a new king. The client kingdom of Adiabene became a third new province under the name of Assyria. This meant that the Tigris became the eastern frontier instead of the Euphrates. Unfortunately these conquests had been too easily achieved, largely through the temporary dissensions of the Parthians, who accordingly failed to experience the salutary discipline of real defeat. Trajan died on his way home, and Hadrian, who was more of a statesman than a warrior, reversed his predecessor’s policy. He surrendered the three new provinces and even acquiesced in the Parthians’ choice of a king of their own in place of the Roman nominee. The only new provinces of Trajan’s creation which Hadrian retained were Dacia and Arabia.
Although their military force was contemptible, their spiritual zeal made the Jews the most difficult people to govern in the whole empire. Worshipping their Jealous God with fierce ardour, they could not join in the Cæsar-worship which was the outward sign of loyalty and patriotism throughout the Roman world. Moreover the Semitic question had already begun to vex the soul of Europe. Throughout the East and especially in the trade centres such as Antioch, Alexandria, and Cyrene there were already large communities of Jews who lived on the usual terms of deep-rooted racial animosity with their neighbours. It is only fair to the Roman government to admit that it tried to conciliate its difficult subjects. Though the vanity of Caligula led him to accept the suggestion of erecting a colossal statue of him in the Temple at Jerusalem, yet when the philosopher Philo and his fellow-ambassadors came over to plead against the outrage the emperor good-humouredly remarked that if people refused to worship him it was more their misfortune than their fault. As a rule the Roman procurators who administered Galilee and Judæa were almost too tolerant of Jewish fanaticism. The Jews were exempt from military service: their Sabbaths were respected. A Roman soldier who tore a book of the law was put to death. It was useless to argue with such sects as the Zealots and Assassins. The Anti-Semite spirit broke out into massacres. In Cæsarea, Damascus, and elsewhere the Gentiles slew the Jews; in Alexandria and Cyrene the Jews slaughtered the Gentiles. In Jerusalem the Romans had to face violent discord between the rival factions, and naturally they sided with the more tolerant and moderate Sadducees against the stern Pharisees and the smaller sects of extremists. In A.D. 66 matters came to a crisis. A Roman garrison was attacked and destroyed: the army which came from Syria to avenge them was repulsed with slaughter. This occurred while the Emperor Nero was on one of his theatrical tours in Greece, and in the next year Vespasian was sent with an army of three legions and auxiliaries which increased its numbers to more than 50,000. During the death of Nero and the short reigns of his three successors, Vespasian was gradually subduing Palestine and driving the irreconcilables before him into Jerusalem. Vespasian himself became emperor and it was left to his son Titus to finish the tragedy.
The siege of Jerusalem (A.D. 70) was one of the most difficult tasks which the Romans ever had to face. In addition to its natural strength there were six lines of fortification to be overcome one by one, and each was defended with all the grim tenacity of which the Semite race is capable when it is on the defensive. Five months the great siege lasted, and at the end Jerusalem was a heap of ruins. Some of the temple treasures were saved for the Roman triumph, and the Arch of Titus still shows us the famous seven-branched golden candlestick being carried up to the temple of Capitoline Jove.66 It is said that one million Jews perished in the siege and 100,000 more were sold into slavery. Jerusalem became merely the camp of the Tenth Legion. All Judæa became one province, and the scattered Jews were only allowed to keep their privileges on condition of registering their names and paying a fee of two denarii every year for their licence.
But this awful lesson had not quenched the fire of Jewish patriotism nor killed their hopes of an earthly Messiah who should restore the kingdom of David. Once again under Hadrian there was a Jewish rebellion stimulated by the fact that the emperor forbade the rite of circumcision and decreed the foundation of a Roman colony at Jerusalem with a temple to Jupiter on Mount Zion. The revolt was stamped out with merciless severity and the Jews were scattered for ever.
The only other noteworthy addition to the Roman Empire was Mauretania (Morocco), which was incorporated as a province by Caligula. The motive alleged was the emperor’s desire to possess himself of the treasures of Ptolemy, its king.
On the whole, then, we can see that the Roman Empire had almost reached its natural limits. It had seized as much as it could govern, and now, with the exception of the Parthian kingdom, all that lay outside its frontiers was naked barbarism. So the centre grew more and more unwarlike, while the legions had little to occupy their minds except the speculation whether their particular general had a chance of the purple. For this reason alone the Cæsars were loth to embark on conquests, unless like Trajan they were willing to neglect everything else and undertake the campaigns in person. A victorious general was always to be dreaded by his master.
The Principate
At first sight the position of the princeps, who was absolute lord of this world, is one of immense and terrible power. But earthly power has its natural limits in human weakness. The weak or wicked emperors were generally the servants of their favourites, male or female, or they lived under fear of the legions. Without their bureaux they were helpless, and the bureaux in the skilled hands of Roman knights or Greek freedmen were acquiring the real power. But it is astonishing how much actual work was done by the more conscientious Cæsars. In Pliny’s letters we see what minute details were referred by a provincial governor to his master and how minutely they were answered. The answers may be, and no doubt sometimes are, the composition of secretaries, but there is a personal note in them which often suggests the emperor’s own dictation. Probably Trajan was exceptionally industrious and Pliny exceptionally meticulous. Nevertheless it looks as if a strong emperor actually ruled this vast domain. It is one of the merits of despotism that the monarch’s power increases automatically with his virtues and capacity. A Caligula could not do so much harm: an Augustus, a Claudius, a Trajan, or a Hadrian might benefit millions of mankind. I think it is clear that they did so. The insane work of slaughter, which is all that interests the ordinary historian, had almost ceased. All over the world the markets were full, the workshops were noisy with hammers, the seas were thronged with ships, the great highways busy with travellers. Justice was strong and even-handed. Taxes were low and equitably assessed. For the most part men had liberty to go their own ways and worship their own gods. From the accession of Augustus to the death of Antoninus Pius—and with a few intervals one might safely go further—the world was enjoying one of its golden periods of prosperity. It is unhistorical to look ahead and pronounce this happy world to be already doomed.
Yet, on the other hand, it is idle to deny the unsound spots in this imposing fabric of empire. The weakness was at the centre. The Roman aristocracy was gay and splendid, but not happy or secure. The ghost of the Republic still haunted her streets. To make a necessary repetition: if Augustus had been succeeded by a son as wise and tactful as himself, and if the throne had then passed to a third generation with the soldierly qualities of Trajan and the statesmanship of Diocletian, the Empire might have taken shape as a strong hereditary monarchy with a senate co-operating heartily, and an army obeying loyally. But that was not fated so. Tiberius was too proud to play the comedy as Augustus had done: instead he made enemies of the aristocracy and became suspicious and tyrannical. When they lampooned and abused him, he turned into a despot. Cremutius Cordus, the historian, was executed for calling Cassius “the last of the Romans.” At last Tiberius withdrew himself in gloomy despair and left the government in the hands of an unscrupulous intriguer, the knight Sejanus, who still further harried and alienated the nobles. It is hard to know the truth about Gaius, so palpably is his story written by satirists. He may have been mad. The adulation which surrounded the Cæsars was enough to turn the head of a vain youth. He was certainly extravagant and increased his unpopularity by taxes upon litigants and prostitutes. It was the officers of the prætorian guard who conspired to assassinate him.
Claudius was chosen by the bodyguard who had murdered his predecessor and he bought their allegiance with £120 apiece. He was the uncle of Caligula, but no process of adoption had lifted him into the royal house. Still he was the grandson of Livia and his assumption of the name “Cæsar” passed without comment. Claudius set Augustus before him as his model and in all things he was careful to return to republican precedents. He took the office of censor for the revision of the senate-roll. He increased the patriciate, encouraged the State religion and by personal attention improved the administration of justice. The cause of most of the trouble during the preceding reigns had been the practice of “delation.” Even under the Republic criminal prosecutions had been the easiest method of obtaining political notoriety. Tiberius and Gaius had added the motive of pecuniary gain. Claudius now repealed the obnoxious laws of treason, punished the laying of information and forbade slaves to give evidence against their masters. By the repeal of the treason laws Claudius had almost ceased to be a monarch, and he was careful to revive the old legislative processes of the republic. On the other hand, under Claudius the power of the bureaucracy was greatly increased, and the affairs of the Empire were principally conducted by the three powerful Greek secretaries.
On the death of Claudius—when the emperors died in their beds poison was invariably alleged—Nero succeeded almost as a matter of course. His mother Agrippina had secured his succession by having him raised to honour just as had been done for Tiberius by Augustus. He had already been styled “Prince of the Youth,” designated for the consulship and endowed with the proconsular power. There was, however, a possible rival in the young Britannicus, and Nero was chosen by the prætorian guard just as clearly as Claudius. During the first five years, when the young prince was engaged in enjoying himself under the guidance of the philosopher Seneca, the senate had nothing to fear, and the Roman state enjoyed its liberty, but when Tigellinus, the wicked prefect of the guard, gained his evil ascendancy over the mind of Nero there were some prosecutions of influential senators which made the whole senate tremble. Yet, even in these worst days of the worst of emperors, good administration proceeded. Nero himself made an interesting proposal for the abolition of customs in the Empire and, indeed, may fairly be called “The Father of Free Trade.” But the capitalist class succeeded in suppressing the proposal. The duties on corn were, however, reduced and the collection of taxes carefully regulated. Charges of extortion against tax-collectors were given precedence in the law courts, a measure of justice beyond anything that the modern state has attempted. It was much more the dancing and singing of the princeps than the extortions of Tigellinus and the judicial murders of noblemen which caused the unpopularity which brought Nero to his doom. Among the many who fell victims to the ferocity of Tigellinus—for Nero himself was probably harmless enough—were two genuine Republicans of the old school, men who were genuine believers in the Stoic faith and who kept the birthdays of Brutus and Cassius as annual feasts. It is probable that genuine opposition of this sort was far from rare among the aristocracy of the Empire. Writers like Lucan and Tacitus were evidently in sympathy with it, and though Thrasea Pætus and Barea Soranus are famous for the Stoic deaths they died, yet they were only two out of many who lived wholly on the memory of the Republic.
Nero’s fall was caused directly by the defection of the prætorian guards, whose allegiance had been bought in the name of Galba. Nero was the last member of the Julio-Claudian family, and at his death the last shadow of dynastic claim passed away. The succession of the principate became a mere scramble in which the strongest or the luckiest or the heaviest briber won the day. Pretenders sprang up against Galba, several of the armies put forward their generals as competitors for the throne; and Galba himself had not even enough generosity to pay the bribes by which he had secured his throne. Thus the year 69 was a year of incessant civil war. Galba was murdered in the streets of Rome; Otho was defeated in battle near Bedriacum and slain in his camp, Vitellius; the choice of the legions in Germany, reigned from April to December, when Rome was once more occupied by a citizen army. The legions of Syria, seeing that their fellow-soldiers of Spain and Germany had already made their generals into emperors, had determined to take a hand in the game, and now Vespasian came as the fourth Cæsar in the space of a single year.
It speaks well for the solidity of the imperial system as organised by Augustus that it survived the shock of such events as these. It proves that the system was everything and the man little or nothing.
The new Emperor Vespasian, who succeeded after all this turmoil, was different from his predecessors in that he had two grown-up sons ready to succeed him. It is said that Mucianus, a still more powerful Eastern general, had surrendered his claims because he was childless. If so, it was nobly and wisely done. Vespasian was able and willing to restore the machinery of the Augustan principate. He was himself frankly a humble Sabine with no claims of birth. He was firm but not oppressive towards the senate, and he kept control over the prætorian guard by appointing Titus, his son, to its command. He also established the succession beyond doubt by making Titus his consort. Vespasian and Titus were elected consuls year by year. Vespasian’s principal work was to restore the financial credit of the government. Unfortunately the two sons, Titus, and then Domitian, who followed him upon the throne and with him make up the “Flavian” dynasty, were scarcely worthy of their father. Titus was “the darling of the human race,” generous and mild to the senators, but too fond of his popularity to be a strong ruler, and Domitian was a genuine tyrant. With his autocratic system of rule he was naturally oppressive to the aristocracy, and his name is in consequence written on the pages of history as that of a monster of cruelty. Domitian certainly made constitutional changes which rendered the monarchy a more open fact. He took the consulship for ten years to come, he became censor and drew up the senate-roll to suit his fancy, he refused the usual request of the senators that the emperor should admit that he had no power to condemn a senator to death. Also he openly spurned the proud senators and permitted the servile modes of address which Augustus and other emperors had forbidden.
These high-handed proceedings made the senators hate and plot against him. Plots were followed by executions, and Domitian gradually became more and more tyrannical. More of the Stoic Republican party were executed, and the odious practice of delation came once more into vogue. At last there was a successful plot organised in the palace, and Domitian fell to the dagger.
With the three succeeding emperors, Nerva (96-98), Trajan (98-117), and Hadrian (117-138), we have a series of genuine constitutional rulers who show the system of the principate at its best. The excellent figure which these rulers cut on the page of history is not wholly unconnected with the fact that we have now passed beyond the region illuminated by the satire of Tacitus and the tittle-tattle of Suetonius. Their deeds speak for them. In Nerva we have the senate’s choice of a ruler, elderly, blameless, but decidedly weak. Had he not died in less than two years, he could easily have brought the throne of the Cæsars down to the ground. Knowing his own weakness, Nerva had adopted the foremost soldier of his day as his heir, and Trajan, beloved of the soldiers and ready to purchase the love of the Rome rabble, succeeded without a murmur. He spent most of his reign in the camp. In the camp he died, and the succession was by no means clear when Hadrian, a kinsman though a distant one, had the courage to seize and the luck to hold the imperial power. All these three emperors granted the senate’s claim that the emperor should not have the power to condemn a senator to death, and in some aspects the senate seemed to have regained much of its old independence. But Trajan was too masterful and Hadrian too ubiquitous to leave any real scope for senatorial initiative. It was really under these benevolent despots that the Dyarchy ceased to have any significance. As usual the benevolence of the despot was the most fatal enemy to liberty. Not only in Rome but even in the municipalities of Italy politics were ceasing to have any real meaning, and men of standing had to be coerced into taking part in the comedy. The bureaucracy of the imperial palace now governed the world, and the better it governed the more quickly did the life-blood of the Roman world run dry in its veins. We now find imperial “curators” and accountants going up and down the provinces to set their finances in order. Whenever there is trouble in any corner of the earth, an imperial “corrector” travels down from Rome by the admirable system of imperial posts to set it right. Where, of old, a local squire, the patronus of the municipality, would leave a charitable legacy for the maintenance and education of poor children, the state with its admirable system of “alimenta” was beginning to assume the responsibility. The state had its Development Fund which made loans on mortgage at very low interest, generally 5 but sometimes 2½ per cent., to small farmers, and the interest was applied to orphanages and the education of the poor. Nerva has the credit for introducing this splendid system of public charity and Hadrian developed it. It was Hadrian also who gave the finishing touches to the organisation of the civil service as a close bureaucracy entirely divorced from the military profession. This service was chiefly in the hands of the knights, and it ranged in a carefully graded hierarchy of officialdom down from the three principal Secretaries of State, the Finance Minister, the Chief Secretary, and the Minister of Petitions, down to the Fiscal Advocates who looked after local revenue. Though the Roman Empire is often represented as groaning under the weight of taxation, and no doubt the more extravagant emperors did amass heavy liabilities, yet Hadrian, who followed an emperor extravagant both in warfare and building, was able to remit about nine millions sterling of arrears due to the fisc. He also introduced a system of periodical reassessments and gave the fullest liberty for his tenants-in-chief to appeal against the collectors. Hadrian it was, also, who really introduced the system of installing a junior colleague in the Empire, a plan which Augustus had foreshadowed in his elevation of Tiberius.
This plan produced one of the firmest dynasties which ever held the imperial throne, namely, the Antonines, Marcus Aurelius, Titus, Antoninus Pius, and Commodus, who ruled from Hadrian’s death in 138 to 192. The age of the first two Antonines is considered by Gibbon and many others to be the culmination of the Roman imperial system.
Two facts of very great importance stand out from this hasty review of the principate during its first two centuries. In the first place, it is still, in the strict constitutional sense, a compromise. The theory of the constitution had not changed since Augustus, if, indeed, it had ever changed. It is still a Republic—Respublica Romana—governed by senate, consuls, tribunes, and an intermittent public assembly. There is, as there nearly always had been, a princeps, that is, leading citizen, a man raised by personal eminence and prestige far above his colleagues. Certain powers are delegated to him by the state. Above all he is master of the legions because he has consular or proconsular authority over all the provinces where troops are stationed. There still remained certain theoretical limitations to his power. He could not, for example, impose a tax on Rome or Italy by his own authority. But the feebleness and sycophancy of the senate and magistracy made him actually omnipotent. When a certain senator was pointed out by Cæsar’s freedman as an enemy to Cæsar the doomed man was set upon by his colleagues and stabbed to death with their pens in the senate-house. It is true that this sycophancy was not altogether the fault of the senate. Under the tyrannical emperors like Tiberius, Nero, and Domitian, emperors who encouraged the “delator,” no senator’s life was secure. At a frown from Cæsar it was customary to go home and open one’s veins after writing a complimentary will in which one bequeathed everything to that best of rulers. This sort of behaviour led inevitably to the growth of the monarchy. The emperor was the one person who dared to act, and the more capable and well-intentioned the ruler, the more closely were the fetters riveted around the necks of the Roman People. The silent growth of bureaucracy, of which the historians have little to tell us, but which we can gather from the inscriptions of the period, is both the symptom and the cause of this increasing power of the principate.
In the second place, it is important to notice that although the city of Rome was growing marvellously in riches and splendour, she was losing her old domination in the world, and becoming the capital instead of the mistress of the Empire. The magistracies of the city had almost ceased to have any importance except as inferior grades on the road to proconsulships. Italy herself was sinking into the position of one among the provinces of the Empire, and with the growth of Hadrian’s centralised system of imperial administration even the provinces were losing their significance as units of government. It seems impossible that almost the whole of Europe and large parts of Asia and Africa could ever have been governed by one man or even one bureau. Yet it was almost achieved by the Roman Empire. The world-state was almost a fact, and a few more Trajans and Hadrians would have accomplished it. The city-state idea, as a unit of patriotism, still flourished. But with the great roads stretching like railways to the four corners of the earth, and the imperial officers travelling along them, with the legions massed along the frontiers and men recruited in Spain sent to serve in Britain, the sense of territory, from which the modern state was to arise, began to develop itself.
Imperial Rome
If the external history of the Empire has suffered by being so largely in the hands of the opposition, the intimate life of the city has been still more distorted through being written for us by satirists. The humorous or venomous descriptions of Juvenal, Martial, and Petronius form our principal source of information, and Pliny, who gives us a very different picture of tranquil and cultivated leisure or of useful activity carried on in refined and elegant surroundings, has commonly been regarded as a remarkable exception. Yet the material remains are on the side of Pliny; and we owe a great debt to modern writers, like Dr. Dill, who have been able to emphasise this point. Romances such as those of Lytton, Melville, and Sienckewicz have embroidered the theme of Juvenal, and everybody nowadays has his vision of Imperial Rome based upon such fairy-tales. It is probably vain to attempt a refutation of the popular view which pictures the Roman of the Empire as exclusively spending his time in the amphitheatre watching the lions devour the Christians, except when he was supping on nightingales’ tongues from plates of gold. Moreover these things are a not unimportant part of the truth. Imperial Rome remained as bloody and brutal in its amusements as Republican Rome. In fact, as the emperors were not only richer than the old senators, but also much more carefully watched and bitterly lampooned, so the number of wild beasts slain at a venatio of Trajan exceeded the slaughters exhibited by Pompeius. Doubtless the imperial epicure Apicius excelled the republican glutton Lucullus in the variety of his menu, and the lascivious entertainments of Petronius Arbiter and his master Nero certainly dwarfed the attempts of Sulla. At heart it was the same Roman People, enjoying the same stupid pleasures and violent sensations under circumstances of greater magnificence and refinement. It was a society founded on slavery, acknowledging no limits to the free indulgence of pleasure. But one misconception must be combated. The whole imperial period of five centuries should not be regarded as one slippery Gadarene slope down which the Romans were hurrying to destruction. Fashions came and went. Extravagance was at its height under Nero: there was a reaction towards greater simplicity under Vespasian. Under Trajan and Hadrian life was orderly and refined. Under M. Aurelius philosophy was even more fashionable than vice. Nor was bloodshed the only form of public enjoyment; the amphitheatres often presented spectacles quite as inoffensive and much more splendid than our modern hippodromes and circuses. Chariot-racing, in particular, though a good deal more dangerous than the modern steeplechase, took its place along with gladiators and beast-baiting as the popular sport, and the Romans showed as much enthusiasm for Coryphæus and Hirpinus as we do for our Ormondes and Persimmons. The charioteer Lacerna had as much vogue with them as had Fred Archer with our fathers, and they took sides with the Prasina Factio even more seriously than we do with Light or Dark Blue oarsmen. The Romans had an inherited taste for blood. There were philosophers who condemned gladiatorial shows, but the defence of the ancient sportsman was similar to and perhaps not less true than the modern fox-hunter’s excuse: the gladiators themselves enjoyed the fun almost as much as the spectators.
On the whole, apart from its follies, material civilisation was steadily advancing during the whole period at present under review. In such matters as transit, public health, police, water-supply, engineering, building, and so forth, Rome of the second century left off pretty much where the reign of Queen Victoria was to resume. The modern city of Rome is obtaining its drinking-water out of about three of the nine great aqueducts which ministered to the imperial city. The hot-air system which warms the hotels of modern Europe and America was in general use in every comfortable villa of the first century A.D. Education was more general and more accessible to the poor in A.D. 200 than in A.D. 1850. The siege artillery employed by Trajan was as effective, probably, as the cannon of Vauban.
The city of Rome must have been a wonderful spectacle under the emperors. One of our modern international exhibitions might faintly recall a little of its splendours, with gilt and stucco for gold and marble. Northward from the slope of the Aventine Hill there was a succession of majestic public buildings, temple beyond temple, forum beyond forum, as each of the great emperors had added to the work of his predecessor and endeavoured to eclipse it. At your feet would be the Circus Maximus, where the chariot-races were held, and behind it the Palatine Hill crowded with palaces. To the east of it ran the Triumphal Road passing through the Arch of Constantine to the Colossus of Nero and the mighty Flavian Amphitheatre known to us as the Colosseum. From there the Sacred Way led north-west through the Arch of Titus past the Temple of Venus and Rome and the Basilica of Constantine to a series of stately fora, opening one from the other and containing altars, columns, arches, statues, and temples surrounded with shady colonnades, whose cloisters served for business and pleasure. Above them on the west rose the ancient Capitoline Hill crowned with its great Temple of Jupiter and immemorial citadel. Picture these magnificent spaces filled with grave citizens in their flowing white togas, hurrying slaves in their bright tunics, visitors and barbarians from all corners of the earth, trousered Gauls, skin-clad Sarmatians, mitred Parthians. Every now and then the burly gladiators swagger through the crowd admired by every one, or a procession of the shaven begging priests of Isis passes by with strange cries and gestures. Perhaps the lictors come swinging down the hill bidding every one make way for the slaves who carry the litter of the emperor who is on his way to sacrifice. Or fancy the crowd in the Great Amphitheatre, which held more than eighty thousand spectators, with the purple and gold awnings spread to protect them from the blazing sunshine, the auditorium perfumed with scents and cooled by fountains, and the arena at their feet flooded with water to present a naval combat. It is a city wrapped in profound peace, still dreaming amid its splendours that it is the mistress of the world.
And these signs of magnificent material riches were not confined to Rome. Alexandria would almost rival her. Asiatic towns like Ephesus and Antioch presented a similar appearance of luxury and opulence. In the north Lugudunum and even Londinium had a splendour of their own. In Gades Spain had a handsome and highly civilised capital. The Roman remains at Trier utterly dwarf the comfortable erections of a prosperous modern town. Out in the desert at Palmyra67 and Ba’albek68 there were rising into existence those huge buildings which testify to the industry fostered by the provincial government of the emperors. Along the sea-coast of Campania there were sea-fronts of continuous villas whose marble fragments are still washed up in the Bay of Naples. It tasks the imagination of genius to conjure up that glowing world of the past out of the ruined foundations which remain. Turner’s famous picture of Baiæ represents a successful attempt to do so. Pompeii, wonderful as it is, was only a very small and obscure country town. Yet it was lavishly provided with temples, baths, theatre, and amphitheatre.
On the coast of North Africa, where nothing but man’s labour organised under a good government is required to make the desert blossom as a rose, there was a teeming population which prospered on agriculture. Timgad (Thamugadi) was founded in the year 100 as a colony by Trajan, and it was the head-quarters of the Third Legion. Here, in the blank desert of to-day, the French explorers have revealed porticoes and colonnades, a forum, a municipal senate-house, a theatre, a capitol, rostra, a triumphal arch, baths, shrines, and temples, together with the aqueduct and fountains which alone made all this splendour possible.69 For public munificence this age is unequalled in history. It must have been a very powerful sense of patriotism which compelled every rich man to devote so large a part of his fortune to the embellishment of his native town. The benefactions of the modern millionaire seem miserly in comparison. Pliny, who was not a very rich man as wealth was accounted in his day, presented his native town of Como with a library at a cost of nearly £9000, and maintained it with an annual endowment of more than £800. He offered to contribute one-third to the cost of a secondary school, and made the wise provision that the parents of the boys should contribute the rest, in order that they might feel an interest in the school and take pains in the choice of suitable teachers. He gave nearly £5000 more for the support of poor children. He bequeathed more than £4000 for public baths and nearly £16,000 to his freedmen and for public feasts. And, as Dr. Dill has pointed out, the inscriptions of every municipal town prove that this princely generosity and patriotism were by no means the exception. “There was in those days an immense civic ardour, an almost passionate rivalry, to make the mother city a more pleasant and a more splendid home.” Among the most princely of these benefactors was the Athenian Professor of Rhetoric, Herodes Atticus, who added a new quarter to Athens in the reign of Hadrian.
Perhaps the most remarkable feature of life in the Roman Empire under the good emperors of the second century is the growth of a lower class with occupations and ideals of its own. We have already remarked that the poor free Roman of republican days scarcely emerges into the light except as a soldier. But now the inscriptions show us a happy and industrious class of artisans and humble tradesmen, grading down through the freedmen to the slaves, many of whom now lived and worked under quite tolerable conditions of life. Especially noteworthy is the social tendency of the day. Every occupation and craft was forming its guilds or “collegia” about which the inscriptions give us full and most interesting details. The collegia were not quite Friendly Societies, and still less Trade Unions, though they undoubtedly claimed political privileges and perhaps even made some attempt at collective bargaining with the public. Sometimes they obtained exemption from taxation. They dined together, they had their chapels and festivals, their colours and processions. They had officers modelled on the old Roman magistracy, with senators as committee and a quæstor as treasurer. They had their list of patrons who were expected to earn the honour by generosity. In the main they were burial clubs. Even slaves, and even gladiators, the most despised of slaves, had their guilds and fraternities: of course they were regulated by the state.
As yet, in spite of its growing centralisation and spirit of paternal despotism, the Roman government was true to its ancient principle of allowing full local autonomy. The municipal life of a small Campanian town like Pompeii afforded scope for local ambition and a political ardour to which the election posters and the inscriptions scratched or scribbled on the walls bear eloquent witness.70 Sometimes the name of the candidate is written with the laconic addition v. b., “a good man,” or it may be “Please make P. Furius duumvir, he’s a good man.” But occasionally the commendations are more explicit: “a most modest young man,” “he will look after the treasury,” “worthy of public office,” and so forth. Sometimes a trade-guild supports its candidate. Thus the liquor interest in politics is already noticeable in A.D. 70. The humour of the opposition is seen in such a poster as “the pickpockets request the election of Vatia as ædile.” And the intrusion of the feminine element is to be observed in “Claudium IIvir. animula facit” (“His little darling is working for Claudius as duumvir”). The wit of the Pompeian wall-scribe was brighter, though not always cleaner, than that of his modern counterpart. There is the proud inscription “Restitutus has often deceived many girls,” but there are also testimonies of conjugal affection like “Hirtia, the Dewdrop, always and everywhere sends hearty greeting to C. Hostilius, the Gnat, her husband, shepherd and gentle counsellor.” There is also an interesting account from a bakery:
| 1 lb. of oil | 6d. | bran | 9d. |
| straw | 7½d. | a neck-wreath | 4½d. |
| hay | 2s. | oil | 9d. |
| a day’s wages | 7½d. |
We find advertisements like “Scaurus’s tunny jelly, Blossom Brand, put up by Eutyches, slave of Scaurus.”
Education and Literature
A noticeable feature of the times was the wide diffusion of education. Every one, it seems, could read and write, even the slaves, even the humble British workman. Many a Pompeian schoolboy has scribbled a line from Vergil, or Ovid, or Propertius. Many an adult has added his or her original compositions. We have seen in the case of Pliny how the rich men interested themselves in the foundation of schools, both primary and secondary, for their native towns. In the Greek world, as may be expected, education was most highly developed and thoroughly graded from the elementary to the university stage. For elementary schools the voluntary system was in vogue, but it was under careful public supervision, and, as we have seen, the state undertook the maintenance of poor children, girls as well as boys. In contrast to the present day, the teachers were often held in high honour, and many a public inscription testifies to the gratitude of a town towards its schoolmasters. That they also received more substantial recognition is proved by the fact that they were often able to leave handsome benefactions themselves. They were elected, sometimes after an examination or after giving specimen lessons, by the local education committees, with religious ceremonies, and they took an oath of office on entering upon their duties. They had their unions and associations like other professions. In one inscription found in Callipolis, “The young men and the lads and the boys and their teachers” unite to confer a wreath of honour upon one of the mathematical masters. The teachers seem to have been subject to annual election or re-election. There were also visiting masters of special subjects. The Greek secondary school tended to lay much stress upon athletics, but it gave more attention to music and religion than similar institutions of to-day. Reading, writing, and arithmetic together with music, dancing, and drill were the staple subjects of the elementary school. “Rhetoric,” which meant the study of literature on the technical side, as well as the practice of declamations, was the main occupation in the high schools and the universities. But philosophy, moral and physical, was also carefully studied. University professors often rose to real affluence.
In the polite world of Rome, literature was extremely fashionable. Everybody was writing and insisting upon reading his compositions to his friends. These literary labours were often pursued with amazing diligence. Both Pliny and his uncle devoted themselves to reading and writing almost from morning to night, and Pliny the Younger tells how he was laughed at for carrying his notebooks with him even when he was out boar-hunting. By the time he was fourteen he had written a Greek tragedy. His sketch of a day’s doings at his country villa shows the literary perseverance of a Roman gentleman. He rose at six and began to compose in his bedroom. Then he would summon his secretary to take down the result from dictation. At ten or eleven he would continue his work in some shady colonnade, or under the trees in the garden, after which he drove out, still reading. “A short siesta, a walk, declamation in Greek and Latin, after the habit of Cicero, gymnastic exercise, and the bath, filled the space until dinner-time arrived.” Even during dinner a book was read aloud and the evening was enlivened by acting or music or conversation. Many of Pliny’s friends, such as Suetonius and Silius Italicus, emulated this studious existence, and his uncle even excelled it. The elder Pliny consulted two thousand volumes in the writing of his Natural History alone, and he left one hundred and sixty volumes of closely written notes and excerpts. Nor was this an unimportant circle of literary bookworms. On the contrary, it was the highest society of the day. The elder Pliny was on terms of daily intercourse with the Emperor Vespasian, and the younger Pliny besides being governor of Bithynia was intimate with Trajan.
At first sight we may find it strange that all this strenuous devotion to study produced so little in the way of first-rate original literature. It is of course customary to ascribe the decline—assuming that it was a decline—of the Golden Age of Augustan literature into the Silver Latin of Tacitus and Juvenal to the tyranny of emperors like Tiberius and Nero. It is perfectly true that Tiberius made it dangerous for senatorial historians to praise the murderers of a Cæsar. But that is a ludicrously inadequate explanation for the eclipse of literature. The experience of Vergil showed that it was possible for a great loyalist to win fortune and glory amounting to idolisation. The senators who wanted to continue their school declamations against tyranny were certainly discouraged, but there was still plenty of room for literary activity. The truth is, as we have seen, that Augustan literature was not the work of a young Rome, but of an old and perhaps already declining Græco-Roman culture. Again it was literary, not political, causes which led to literary decline. Tacitus, who had for his themes the conquest of Britain and the wars in Germany and the East, the Siege of Jerusalem, the burning of Rome, the tragic Year of the Four Emperors, the crimes and follies of Nero, and the development of the great imperial system, complains of the lack of interest in the history of his own times compared with those of the heroic past. The tyranny that depressed literature was of its own making, the tyranny of convention, classicism and erudition. To take poetry, though so many noble writers were toying with the epic, they only produced the pedantic Thebaid of Statius, the weary Argonauticon of Silius Italicus, an imitation of an imitation of Homer, and the Pharsalia of Lucan, which, though it contains many a brilliant epigram and memorable phrase, is to the majority of mankind almost unreadable. This is simply because Lucan was consciously pursuing the path which Vergil had pointed out and producing work which was the logical succession to the style of the Æneid. The Pharsalia is unmixed declamation, rhetoric shouting at top pitch on page after page. Vergil had accomplished the literary epic to perfection: to carry it any further in the same direction was to incur tediousness. Above all, both Lucan and Silius lacked the greatest of all Vergil’s gifts, his wonderful ear for verbal music. Vergil, like Milton, presented his epic diluted for mortal ears with music and human nature. It was not in the spirit that Lucan failed. He admired the republican cause and Pompeius, its champion, quite as sincerely as Vergil admired Augustus or Milton Cromwell. Thus it was not politics, but the literary gift which caused his failure, at least his failure to hold the ear of to-day. Past generations have esteemed him high among the world’s poets. Dante owed not a little to Lucan and Statius as well as to Vergil.
It was only in its lighter forms that poetry continued to make progress. The Silvæ of Statius, which were shorter occasional poems in elegiac or lyric measures thrown off at odd moments with ease and rapidity, are far more interesting than his frigid epic. Martial, the Spanish writer of vers de société, has a pretty wit that is often surprisingly modern in its tone. Certainly Juvenal towers over all others who have attempted satire. Horace had been content with an easy familiarity of tone which might wheedle a friend into the path of good sense by poking fun at his follies. Juvenal thunders his denunciations of wickedness with a moral heat which is surprising in an age often accused of feebleness. He does, however, resemble Lucan in spoiling some of his effects by want of light and shade, by a too-persistent flow of rhetoric. He seems unable to distinguish between harmless follies like playing the flute and real delinquencies like murdering one’s mother. He clearly draws far too black a picture of the men and morals of his day. But the pulpit from which he preaches is a high one.
If Juvenal is supreme over the poets of his time, Tacitus is as clearly monarch of the prose-writers. He was continuing the work of Livy and writing from the same republican standpoint. But for history-writing he had certainly discovered a finer style of rhetoric. Both are rhetoricians first and historians a long way after, but the packed epigrams of Tacitus say more in a line than Livy is capable of thinking in a chapter. In describing a battle, a riot, or a panic, or in painting some tragic scene, such as the death of Vitellius, Tacitus is unequalled. The freedom that was permitted to him and Suetonius in depicting the crimes and follies of the earlier Cæsars affords remarkable evidence of the freedom of letters under Nerva, Trajan, and Hadrian. Here, again, it is necessary, as in the case of Juvenal, to beware of accepting too literally the severity of his criticisms upon the preceding generation. To praise the past at the expense of the present was one of the traditions of Roman literature. But Tacitus was the last of Rome’s great historians and his loss was irreparable.
All the erudition of the age added little to the real advance of learning except in the domain of law. Industrious compilers like Pliny the elder have preserved a great deal of ancient lore for our study, but they are for the most part utterly uncritical and unscientific. There were no scientific thinkers like Aristotle in the Roman world. Still, some text-books which served the Middle Ages for instruction were produced under the principate, such as Vitruvius on architecture, Strabo and Pomponius Mela on geography, Columella on agriculture, Quintilian on rhetoric, and Galen on medicine. The latter was state-physician to Marcus Aurelius and was employed by him to study and combat the terrible plague which the Roman army brought back from the East. But for medical science he added little to his Greek master Hippocrates. In just the same way, the philosophers came no nearer to the core of reality than their masters of the fourth and third centuries before Christ, hard though they toiled and much as they spoke and wrote. They were indeed learning, what the old Greeks had failed or scorned to learn, how to apply doctrines to life, but in depth of thought they were so far behind that they ceased even to be able to comprehend Aristotle. Even Philo, the profound and learned Jewish philosopher, is doing little more than to attempt an application of Platonic and other Greek ideas to the teaching of Moses. Such originality as there was in the world of letters still proceeded mainly from the provinces. Greece was still putting forth original contributors to literature like the novelist Lucian, the biographer and moralist Plutarch, Pausanias the guide-book writer, Dio Chrysostom and Apollonius the preachers. Africa produced a novelist in the mysterious quack-magician Apuleius. Spain sent forth a whole galaxy of talent in the two Senecas, Martial, Lucan, and Quintilian. The younger Seneca, Nero’s complacent tutor, is perhaps the most typical figure in the literature of the principate. Trained as a rhetorician, like all the men of his day, his literary work consists of rhetorical drama and rhetorical philosophy, including some rhetorical science. No writer has ever attained to such a position of wealth and honour by the exercise of his pen. It cannot be said that Seneca’s position was gained without defilement, or that it brought him happiness. He was largely responsible by his weak compliance for the deterioration of character in his imperial pupil. If so, it brought its own retribution, for Nero drove him to suicide. Though Seneca’s tragedies are neglected to-day, they formed the connecting-link between Euripides and the stage of the Renaissance.
It will be seen that the principal defect of thought and literature under the Empire was its lack of originality. But, after all, that had always been the deficiency of Roman writers. It was due very largely to the overwhelming incubus of Greek civilisation, from whose leading-strings the Romans, to the end of time, never escaped. That in its turn arose chiefly through the nature of their education which turned all their attention to style as the end of literary endeavour. Any one who would argue against a classical education could find no better argument than the relations between the two “classical” peoples.
Art
With art it is much the same story; for the decoration of their villas and colonnades the Romans of the Empire continued to prefer their statues imported from Greece. Pausanias shows us that Greece, even in the second century A.D., was still teeming with works of art of every kind. Impoverished and shrunken as the old Greek cities were at this period, it shows some high-mindedness that they still retained treasures which would have fetched millions in the Trans-Adriatic markets. There was, however, a brisk trade in copies and imitations of the masterpieces. For statues, then, the Greek work of the fifth and fourth centuries almost destroyed any attempt at originality by the Romans. Only in portraiture was there much progress, and here work of great power and vigour was produced. It reaches the zenith perhaps under the Flavian emperors, but their successors of the Antonine period and later are often depicted on their busts with triumphant but unsparing realism. The bust of Philip the Arabian in the Vatican is one of the most striking. Sometimes it almost seems as if there was a malicious spirit of caricature in these too faithful portraits. Can Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher prince, have presented to the world a visage so weak and so tonsorially perfect?71 Can Caracalla have borne his bloody mind so visibly written on his face?72 In portraiture, there is certainly progress and not decay.
Otherwise, to judge by the remains, sculptors were almost confined to bas-relief. This was the medium chosen by emperor after emperor for the narration of his exploits, and advances were unquestionably made in the art of pictorial or narrative sculpture. That this is a high art in itself may, I think, be contested. One cannot escape from a sense of the practical futility of telling the history of the Dacian Wars on a serpentine band of ornament which soared away out of sight. It is rather characteristic of the plodding Roman, who so often lost sight of the wood in his faithful contemplation of the trees. If we look for the end to which this art of narrative relief was tending, we shall find it on the basis of the column of Antoninus Pius preserved in the Vatican garden.73 These cavalrymen placidly gyrating round the group of standard-bearers, each on his own little shelf, are so extremely life-like as to recall nothing in the world so much as pieces of gingerbreads. We begin to perceive that Madame Tussaud would have been hailed as a great creative artist in Imperial Rome. Nevertheless, without subscribing to all the superlatives of Mrs. Strong, we may admit that Art was still alive and vigorous and still scoring fresh technical triumphs in the Antonine period and even later.
Roman archæologists have recently worked out the history of Imperial Art with some precision. The reign of Tiberius continued the classical tendencies of Augustus. Under Claudius there was great constructional activity, mainly of a utilitarian character. The Claudian aqueduct, whose immense arches in brick still break the level horizon of the Campagna, is one of the greatest works of this period.74 Nero’s was an age of Greek curio-hunting; much of Rome was rebuilt after the great fire in his reign and the Golden House must have been a stupendous sight. But on his death the Romans made haste to obliterate all traces of his work. The Flavian epoch was the culminating-point of Roman art. Vespasian destroyed Nero’s Golden House and restored the Capitol. He and his sons built the baths of Titus, the Arch of Titus75 with the celebrated Jewish relief, and the mighty Flavian Amphitheatre, the Colosseum.76 This was built in the style already noticed in the theatre of Marcellus, namely, with the three Greek orders of architecture, Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian, adorning the three stories of the façade; but here, as so often, the Greek façade is a mere shell to hide the solid Roman masonry of which the building is really constructed. It is noteworthy that the monuments of this age refute the historians who allege among Domitian’s other sins that he tried to destroy the works and the memory of Titus, his more popular brother. In the technical language of Wickhoff, this Flavian Age shows us “illusionism” at its height in art. Under Trajan, and in his famous column, the art of continuous narration in low relief is fully developed.77 Hadrian, the cultured, travelling Philhellene, encouraged a reversion to the classical traditions of Greek art. The art of his period was profoundly influenced by the type of Antinous, a beautiful youth beloved by the emperor, whose romantic death by drowning in the Nile made a powerful impression upon the whole Roman world, because he was believed to have sacrificed his life for his emperor’s in obedience to an oracle. This type is preserved for us in many forms, but most notably in the colossal Mondragore bust in the Louvre78 and the bas-relief in the Villa Albani.79 His features were utilised to represent all the young male gods on Olympus. In their tragic beauty we see a mirror of Greece tinged by the Orient, as if Dionysus had wedded Isis and this were the offspring. The Antonine period, as exhibited on the panels in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, is gifted with immense technical fluency and, as Mrs. Strong remarks, a new spiritual seriousness. As compositions they are superb, but the weakness of expression in the face of Marcus Aurelius himself quite spoils their effect for some spectators.80
Architecture was still mainly designed in the three Greek modes variously combined, in spite of the fact that Rome had progressed far beyond Greek limits in constructional ability. Roman builders could manage a roof-span far in excess of the Greeks. The Roman arch gave a strength in concrete vaulting which expensive marble was unable to attain. Roman brickwork denuded of the marble incrustations which generally covered it of old is probably more impressive in its ruins than it was when it was draped with Hellenism, and, to me at least, remains like the aqueduct at Pont du Gard81 and the Bridge of Alcantara82 seem truer witnesses of the grandeur of Rome than all the marbles in all the museums. The celebrated Castle of St. Angelo, which still keeps watch and ward over the Tiber, is nothing but the core of Hadrian’s tomb—the Moles Hadriani—once clad in a vestment of Greek marbles and covered with Greek ornament.83 The Pantheon, in spite of the inscription which ascribes it to Agrippa, is proved by the marks on its bricks to be a restoration of Hadrian’s time. It is indeed a superb example of vaulting and a miracle of construction. The plan is that of a dome so constructed that if the sphere were complete it would rest upon the earth. The magnificent interior has lost little of its ancient splendour.84
For temple architecture, although the Romans had adopted the forms of Greek art they had wholly deserted the spirit of austere self-restraint upon which that art had rested. Thus they readily adopted the luxuriance of the East when it came to hand. In the splendid ruins of Heliopolis (Ba’albek) and Palmyra we see a riotous luxuriance of ornament which would have shocked the religious sense of Ictinus, but which fitly enshrined the ritual and mysteries of the Sungod. This craze for the colossal would have made the reverential Greeks tremble in fear of provoking the Nemesis of a jealous Heaven, but in its ruins it has left us superb and awful reminders of the riches and grandeur of its authors, and of the end of all riches and grandeur.
In domestic building the Romans had almost as little regard as the Greeks for the exterior elevation of their villas and palaces. The Roman gentleman still made it his favourite hobby to collect villas, and Pliny had almost as many as Cicero. But the main idea of the villa was comfort, and the main idea of Roman comfort was coolness, quiet, and beautiful scenery. Thus the wealthy man’s house consisted of a series of marble courts and cloisters spread over the ground regardless of space. Landscape and landscape-gardening were the most charming features. The Roman appreciated the scenery of Como or Sirmione, Tivoli or Naples quite as keenly as the tourist of to-day. He thought much of fresh air and good water. Nearly all Roman gentlemen were agreed in considering Rome itself, with its smells, its noise, and its perils by fire, as a pestilent place of abode, and they gladly fled to their country estates at Præneste or Baiæ. Hadrian’s villa at Tivoli85 included reproductions of many famous buildings which he had seen and admired on his travels. The decoration of these villas encouraged two minor arts which figure prominently among their remains. The floors were commonly adorned with marble mosaic, of which we still have some charming examples.86 The interior walls were incrusted either with marble, in the wealthier houses, or stuccoed and painted. Hence, it results that the Art of Painting is represented to us almost solely by mosaics, wall-frescoes,87 and a few portraits on Egyptian mummy-cases. Nothing remains of the great masters of antiquity, Polygnotus, Zeuxis, and Apelles. But there may be faint echoes of their work on the frescoes of Pompeii executed by unnamed decorators. Even so there is great charm in much of this work. Professor Mau, the great authority on Pompeii, has distinguished four successive phases of painting in that city. At first the aim was to imitate the marble slabs used to cover the walls of the rich man’s house. Then growing bolder the painter imitates various forms of architectural treatment dividing up his wall space into panels and portraying cornices, columns, pilasters, and so forth. This is roughly the style of the first century B.C., and it is found in the so-called house of Livia on the Palatine Hill at Rome.88 The third style, which Mau terms the “ornate,” was prevalent until about A.D. 50.
The architectural features now make no pretence at illusion. The columns have become mere bands of colour, and there is profuse ornament everywhere. The colours are somewhat cold. The fourth or “intricate” style once more emphasises the architectural character of the decoration, but the patterns are too intricate to present any appearance of reality. The whole wall space shows a riot of fantastic ornament often extremely graceful and effective. Flying goddesses and cupids impart a sense of airy lightness, and floral forms festoon themselves in charming curves. The pictures are smaller and the spaces wider. No more pleasing treatment of the interior walls of a house has ever been devised, at any rate for warm climates. The destruction of Pompeii by the eruption of Vesuvius in a.d. 79 brings the history of ancient painting to a premature close.89 The subjects of the pictures are almost exclusively mythological.
The minor arts of the jeweller, the gem-engraver, the goldsmith reach a high state of technical perfection, but they do not improve in spirit or artistic feeling with the progress of the ages. Much of the furniture found at Pompeii and Herculaneum, especially the bronze-work,90 exhibits most graceful forms, always Greek in inspiration.
Law
The greatest intellectual achievement of the Roman people was in the domain of law. The spiritual endowment of the typical Roman included all the qualities of the lawyer—a sense of equity that was quite devoid of sentimentalism, an instinct for order, discipline, and business, a language of great clarity and precision, and above all, a devotion to ceremonies and formulæ which sternly rejected abstract casuistry. Their law took its rise in a series of religious formulæ known only to priests and to the king as chief priest. The Twelve Tables put some of the most ancient principles into words, and partly from their use as a text-book of education, were regarded almost with as much veneration as the Two Tables of Moses. They were, in fact, sometimes considered as the sole fountain of jurisprudence, or at any rate as the sole code of written law. The legislative enactments of the State were on a far lower plane and no ancient people ever considered its legislature capable of turning out a daily quota of legislation as modern parliaments are supposed to do. In the main the fabric of Roman jurisprudence consisted of “case law” made by the judges on the tribunals. The Prætor Urbanus made the Civil Law of Rome, and this became permanent by means of the system of Perpetual Edicts. Religion continued to control the international law of the Roman world, an affair of ceremonies in the hands of the priestly college of heralds—the jus fetiale. But, meanwhile, the prætor peregrinus who had to decide cases between non-citizens was gradually accumulating a body of law, wrongly termed international, in the jus gentium. It was observed that there was a great deal in common between the various codes of the Italian and other Mediterranean States, and this was put together in the foreign prætor’s edict. The more philosophical jurists, inspired with the Stoic doctrines about following nature, evolved the theory that this common element of various nations was nothing but the Natural Law, jus naturæ. It was a fruitful error, and it lies at the base of much of the modern “international law” as expounded by Grotius and other seventeenth-century jurists.
The Civil Law of Rome was in the main, then, a series of precedents handed down by prætor to prætor from times beyond record. To it was added a large body of “counsel’s opinions” which drew their validity largely from the eminence of their authors. It was Hadrian who set about the systematisation of these. He organised the jurisprudentes into a regular profession. He appointed his “counsellors” from the leading barristers of the day, and he gave to the whole body of responsa prudentium, “the opinions of the learned,” the validity of statutory law. The justice and precision of the civil law was the most attractive feature of Roman civilisation to the barbarian world. Gallic and British communities made haste to learn Latin in order that they might gain the “Latin right” which admitted them to the privilege of enjoying Roman law. In A.D. 212, Caracalla, who did little else to deserve the gratitude of posterity, uttered a single edict called the “Antonine Constitution” which admitted the whole empire to the privileges of Roman citizenship. Now a single code ran throughout the whole Western world. Hadrian had set his most distinguished lawyers, under the leadership of Salvius Julianus, to codify the “perpetual edict” of the prætors. It was under the Antonines that some citizen from the East, who is only known to us by the common prænomen of Gaius, wrote those learned “Institutes of Roman Law” which are still the nursery of our lawyers. But it was the great Eastern emperor Justinian (A.D. 527-565) who codified the whole body of civil law in a series of immense documents. Roman law had already conquered its barbarian conquerors, the Goths, and almost every European legal system except our own is based upon that ancient law which arose from the Twelve Tables and the prætor’s edict. The canon law of the Church was Roman law in its essence.
Philosophy and Religion
Much attention has been paid in recent years to the religious development of the Romans under the Empire, and to the momentous conflict of religions which was going on from the age of Hadrian until the final triumph of Christianity. Humanly speaking, it was “touch and go” between several religions competing for the vacant place in the faith of the Empire, and at the last the strife was practically narrowed down to a duel between two oriental monotheistic systems, Mithraism91 and Christianity. The subject is too vast for anything like adequate treatment here. But I would emphasise one point of view which is often overlooked.
The Roman state is too often regarded merely as the enemy and persecutor of the Christian religion. It is forgotten how large a share Rome may claim in its establishment. Not only did the Romans discover Christianity, but they organised it and sent it forth conquering and to conquer in the wake of the legions. It is not a case of a wicked and corrupt people suddenly converted in the midst of its sins. On the contrary it is easy to show that the thinkers of the Roman Empire were tending towards philosophic and religious ideas which made them ready to accept with astonishing rapidity both the ethical teaching and the theological revelations of the Son of God. It is unnecessary to remind the modern reader how large a part the Greek philosophy of Stoicism with its Roman modifications had played in shaping the thoughts of one Roman citizen, Paul of Tarsus. Philo, the Alexandrian Platonist, had developed a doctrine of the Divine Logos, which profoundly influenced the philosophy of the fourth Evangelist, and through him the whole course of Christian teaching.
The Romans may have added little to abstract philosophy or to metaphysics, but they made the somewhat barren abstractions of Zeno the Stoic into something more than a philosophy, into a faith which had a power to influence conduct far beyond the power of the State system of half-Greek Olympian Gods. If the power and the sincerity of a religion may be tested rather by its martyrs than by its proselytes, Stoicism had a worthy record. Men like Thrasea Pætus, Helvidius Priscus, and Barea Soranus were facing the tyrant’s frown for the sake of their Stoic sense of duty, just as truly as Peter and Polycarp.
The attitude of the Roman Government towards Christianity has been too often explained to need more than a brief recapitulation. At first Christianity was confounded with Judaism, which had already begun to make converts at Rome without seeking for them. The Roman government was extraordinarily tolerant towards creed, but it demanded an external compliance with the Cæsar-worship, which it was imposing on the provinces as a test of loyalty. But the Christians did not take the divine command “render unto
Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s” to include scattering incense on his altars. Too many of them had been brought up in the punctilious exclusiveness of the Jewish tradition for them to display on such points the laxity which is sometimes called broad-mindedness. Even in the private intercourse of social life the Christians were unpleasantly apt to insist upon their scruples. The meat in the butchers’ shops had often been slain in sacrifice, and the Christian conscience revolted at “meat offered to idols.” The libation with which the wine-cup started on its rounds was another offence to the tender monotheistic conscience. These things made the Christians unpopular. Their close associations, their secret meetings and love-feasts, the communism which they practised, all aroused the suspicions which are begotten of mystery. Lastly, their conviction that the Second Coming and the Day of Judgment were at hand made them ardent proselytes. It made them utter prognostications of death and damnation to all around them, and to see apocalyptic visions of the fall of the kingdoms of this earth. Such prophecies were sometimes misunderstood as involving treasonable designs. The first persecution under Nero was largely the result of such suspicions.
But the official attitude of the permanent Roman Government is probably revealed in the famous correspondence between Pliny and his emperor, Trajan. Imperial Rome is not to set up an inquisition. No man is to be punished for his faith, but if he is accused to the governor and is obstinate in refusing to pay the obeisance demanded by the state he is to be punished for his contumacy. That is precisely the attitude which the most humane and enlightened Christian states have adopted towards heresy. Later, when the Faith grew in importance, and when it even reached the point of soldiers refusing the military oaths, occasional emperors, often the better emperors, strove to fight against it. Then there were sometimes inquisitions and wholesale martyrdoms as under Decius and Diocletian. But no martyrdom, however public or agonising, could quench the faith of those who saw the heavens opening and the Angels of God descending with their crowns of glory. The publicity of the scenes and the constancy of the victims increased, as usual, the number of the converts. Foolish magistrates sought to encounter obstinacy with further severity, and the Faith only grew the more abundantly. It was not so much his personal conversion—for that was tardy and half-hearted—as the motive of policy to secure an advantage over Maxentius, which induced Constantine to promulgate the Edict of Milan in 313, by which toleration was extended to the Christian faith throughout the Roman Empire.
We must not be surprised that the best emperors, including the philosopher and saint, Marcus Aurelius, were the most bitterly hostile to Christianity. That is human nature. Stoic philosophers were teaching very much in common with Christian philosophy, but that renders it all the less likely that Stoic philosophers should be among the converts. Nevertheless Christian doctrine, especially in the Græco-Jewish communities of Asia Minor, was falling on prepared soil. The Stoic paradoxes had undoubtedly prepared the way for the Christian paradoxes. The doctrines of humility and asceticism were a commonplace of the Cynics. “No Cross, no Crown,” “He who would save his life must lose it”—such sayings as these would gain immediate assent from thoughtful Romans. Epictetus, a heathen slave of Domitian’s day, wrote his answer to the tyrant: “No man hath power over me. I have been set free by God. I know His Commandments; henceforth no man can lead me captive.” The Stoics were daily teaching that it is hard for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of God. This is the creed of Marcus Aurelius: “To venerate the gods and bless them, and to do good to men, and to practise tolerance and self-restraint.” The horrors of the amphitheatre are one side of imperial society. But on the other side Musonius Rufus, a Stoic who stood high in the favour of Vespasian and Titus, went among the soldiers to preach against militarism. Slave-drivers as the Romans were, they were beginning to feel a sense of the brotherhood of man.
Seneca was calling the slaves “humble friends.” “Man is a holy thing to man,” he says; and such teaching was reflected even in the legislation of the day. Juvenal pleads passionately for kindness to slaves and for moral purity in the home. Seneca not only feels that men are brothers, but that God is the Father of us all. We have seen how public charity was finding expression in the alimenta and the free schools. “Love them that hate you” would not strike the Romans of the second century as anything more than a strong expression of the truth they had already begun to recognise. Thus the practical side of Christian ethics found its harmonies in the conduct as well as the theory of the more enlightened pagans. Peace and humanitarianism were in the air of the Antonine Age.
As for religious dogma the whole tendency of thought was towards monotheism. “God is a Spirit” would find an instant acquiescence among educated Romans, even though they frequented the temples of a hundred different gods. Philosophy among Greeks and Romans alike had always been monotheistic. On the subject of immortality the philosophers were divided. Marcus Aurelius and Seneca are on the whole not hopeful. Probably the beliefs of the common folk—as testified in the epitaphs of their cemeteries—were equally divided. The laconic epitaph: “I was not, I was: I am not, I care not,” is common. But other epitaphs equally common express the hope of reunions in the other world or even of being “received among the number of the gods.” But on the whole the commonest view of Death was as a happy release and an unending sleep. It was the immediate hope of eternal bliss, which was the greatest thing that Christianity had to offer to the pagan world.
Rome, then, was in many ways prepared for the reception of Christianity, whose doctrines found an echo in the aspirations of the day. She did much to give to Christian theology its Western form, and of course the ritual and practice of the Roman Church was in many ways merely a continuation of old pagan rites and ceremonies. Ancient deities became Christian saints without change of rite or cult; images were often adapted and even names scarcely altered. But, in fact, the whole conception of that mighty Church which conquered the world, including the barbarian invaders, was the offspring of the Roman political system. It was her genius for statecraft which made Rome the Eternal City. In one form or another she has governed the world for twenty centuries.