THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES 61ft From the Library of Henry Goldman, Ph.D. 1886-1972 NIEBUHR'S LECTURES ON ROMAN HISTORY. VOL. II. NIEBUHR'S LECTURES ON ROMAN HISTORY TRANSLATED FROM THE EDITION OF DR. M. ISLER, By H. M. CHEPMELL, M.A., AND F. DEMMLER, PH.D. /.V THREE VOLUMES.— VOL. II. lantton: CHATTO & WIND US, PICCADILLY. 1875. CONTENTS. Page FIRST PUNIC WAR, . . 1 Foundation of Carthage, .... 1 Earliest history of Carthage, .... 2 Extent of the Carthaginian empire at the outbreak of the war, ...... 4 Constitution of Carthage, . . . 5 Geographical description of Sicily, . . 8 Division of the war, ..... 9 Siege of Agrigentum, .... 10 Conquest of Agrigentum, . . . .11 A Human fleet built, .... 12 Boarding-bridges, . . . .14 Naval victory of C. Duilius near Mylae, . . 15 Events of less importance, . . . .16 New naval force of the Romans, . . . 17 Seafight near Ecnomus, . . . .19 Regulus lands in Africa, .... 20 Prodigy in Regulus' camp, . . . .21 Negotiations for a peace, .... 21 Xanthippus, . . . . . .22 Regulus defeated, . . . . . 24 Shipwreck of the Roman fleet, . ^ .24 Regulus' death. Criticism on the tales concerning it, 25 Victory of Metellus near Panormus, . . 28 Siege of Lilybseum, . . . . .29 Defeat of P. Claudius near Drepana, . . 32 Claudius appoints M. Claudius Glycia as dictator, . 33 Destruction of a merchant fleet, ... 34 Eryx surprised and taken, . . . .35 Hamilcar Barcas, ..... 35 Searight near the JEgatian Isles, . . .38 End of the war, ..... 40 Vi TABLE OF CONTENTS. Page SICILY A ROMAN PROVINCE. PRA1TOR PERE- GRINUS. WAR WITH THE FALISCANS. MU- TINY OF THE MERCENARIES AT CARTHAGE. THE FIRST ILLYRIAN WAR. THE LEX FLA- MINIA FOR THE DIVISION OF THE AGER GAL- LICUS PICENUS. WAR AGAINST THE CISALPINE GAULS. SECOND ILLYRIAN WAR. THE CAR- THAGINIANS FOUND AN EMPIRE IN SPAIN, . 41 Sicily a Roman province. Definition of the word pro- vince, . . . . . . 41 Praetor peregrinus, . . . . .42 The public festivals are paid for by the aadiles, . 42 The character of the senate changes, . . .43 War with the Faliscans, . ... 43 Mutiny of the mercenaries at Carthage, . . 44 Sardinia rebels against Carthage, ... 45 Another peace between Carthage and Rome, . . 4(5 The first Illyrian war, 4« Embassy of the Romans to Greece, . . .47 Greek affairs, . . . . . 48 The agrarian law of Flaminius, . . .50 War with the Cisalpine Gauls, ... 52 Battle near Clastidium, . . . 5 ft Second Illyrian war, . . . , 57 A Carthaginian empire founded in Spain, . . 58 Peoples of Spain, ..... ">'.< Death of Hamilcar, . . . . .61 THE SECOND PUNIC WAR, . 61 Sources and literature, . . .' .62 Hannibal, ...... G4 P. Cornelius Scipio, . • . . .66 Q. Fabius Maximus, .... 67 M. Claudius Marcellus, . . . .68 Division of the war, . . . - 68 War in Spain, . . . . .68 Siege of Saguntum, . . . . 71 Embassy to Carthage, . . . .72 March of Hannibal across the Pyrenees, . . 75 Hannibal in Gaul, . . . . .76 His passage over the Alps, . . . 77 Battle on the Ticinus, . . . .83 Battle on the Trebia, ... 84 TABLE OF CONTENTS. vu Page C. Flaminius, ...... 87 Hannibal wades through the marshes, . . 89 Battle of the Trasimene lake, . . .91 Q. Fabius Maximus dictator, ... 94 Fabius hems in Hannibal near Mount Callicula, . 96 Minucius defeated by Hannibal, . 97 C. Terentius Varro, . . . . .97 Battle of Cannae, ..... 99 Maharbal advises Hannibal to inarch to Rome, . 103 Hannibal in Capua, . . . .103 The Italian peoples fall off from Rome, . . 107 Efforts made by the Romans, . . . 108 Ti. Sempronius Gracchus conquers near Beneventum, 110 Hannibal at the gates of Rome, . . .112 Taking of Capua, . . . . .113 Death of Hiero, . . . . .114 Negotiations of Hieronymus, . . . 115 Disturbances at Syracuse, . . . .115 Siege of Syracuse, . . . . .116 Archimedes, . . . . . .117 Taking of Syracuse. Marcellus' conduct, . 117 Taking of Agrigentum, . . . .119 War in Spain, . . . . .120 Death of the two Scipios, .... 121 P. Cornelius Scipio Africanus, . . . 122 Taking of New Carthage, . . . .124 Hasdrubal goes to Italy, . . . .124 Battle of Sena, . . . . .126 Spain in the power of the Romans, . . 128 Mutiny of the troops in the camp of Scipio in Spain, 128 Scipio goes to Africa to Syphax, . . .131 Scipio is appointed consul, . . . 132 Voluntary armaments of the Italians, . . 133 Scipio lands in Africa, .... 135 Masinissa, . . . . . . 135 Syphax made prisoner, .... 137 Offers of peace by the Carthaginians, . . . 137 Hannibal and Mago summoned to Africa, . 139 Battle of Zama, . . . . .140 Peace, .... . 141 MACEDONIAN WAR, . . 143 Treaty of Philip with Hannibal, . . .143 Philip, .144 Affairs of the Greek states, . . . 144 Vlll TABLK OF CONTENTS. Page Peace of the Romans with the JEtolians, . . 146 Peace of the Romans with Philip, . . 146 Attacks of Philip and Antiochus on the Egyptian empire, 147 Causes of the second Macedonian war, . .148 Its outbreak, . . . . .150 State of Greece, . . . . .150 T. Quinclius Flamininus, .... Victory of the Romans near the fauces Antigonece, . 155 Battle of Cynoscephalse, ... * 157 Quarrels of the Romans and JStolians, . .159 Peace with Philip, . . . . . 161 Peace with Greece, . . . . .161 THE INSUBRIANS AND BOIANS VANQUISHED. WAR WITH ANTIOCHUS. WAR WITH 1HE GA- LATIANS, . ... 164 War with the Insubrians, . . . .164 War with the Boians, .... 164 Antiochus, . . . . . .165 Hannibal in Syria, . . . . . 167 Battle of Thermopylae, . . . . 1 73 Siege of Ambracia, . . . .174 Peace with the Italians, . . . .175 Battle of My onnesus, . . . .175 Battle of Magnesia, . . . . .178 Peace with Antiochus, . . . .179 War with the Galatians, ... . .180 Earlier history of the Galatians, . . . 181 Cn. Manlius conquers the Galatians, . . . 182 IMPEACHMENT OF L. SCIPIO. END OF P. SCIPIO AFRICANUS AND OF HANNIBAL. DOMESTIC AFFAIRS. M. PORCIUS CATO, . . 184 Impeachment of the Scipios, .... 184 Increase of the tribes, . . . .185 Increase of the number of praetors, . . .185 Fate of the Italians, .... Changes at home, . . . . .187 Corruption of morals, . . . .188 Embellishment of the city, . . . .190 M, Porcius Cato, ..... 190 Influence of moneyed property, . . . 1 92 Hannibal's death, . . . . . 193 TABLE OF CONTENTS. IX Page LITERATURE OF THE ROMANS AT THIS PERIOD. ATELLANJE, PRETEXT AT^E ; LIVIUS ANDRO- NICUS; N^EVIUS; ENNIUS; PLAUTUS. ROMAN HISTORIANS IN GREEK, . . . .194 Native Koman civilization, . . . 194 Atellan plays, . . . . . .195 Translation of Greek literature. Livius Andronicus, 1 95 Naevius, Plautus, . . . . .196 Ennius, . . . . . .198 Pacuvius, . . . . . .199 Q. Fabius Pictor. L. Cincius Alimentus, . .199 WARS WITH THE LIGURIANS; WITH THE CELTI- BERIANS. THE THIRD MACEDONIAN WAR. PEACE WITH THE RHODIANS. FURTHER WARS IN SPAIN. STATE OF AFFAIRS AT HOME, . 199 War with the Ligurians, .... 200 Standing armies, ..... 201 Campaign of Cato in Spain, .... 202 Ti. Sempronius Gracchus concludes the war with the Celtiberians, ..... 203 Third Macedonian war, .... 203 Negotiations with the Bastarnians, ' . . 204 Perseus, Demetrius, . . . • . . 205 Character of Perseus, .... 206 State of affairs in Greece and Asia, . . . 206 Murderous attack on Eumenes at Delphi, . 206 Outbreak of the war, .... 208 The neighbouring countries inclined in favour of Perseus, 211 L. JEmUius Paullus, general of the Romans, . 212 Battle of Pydna, ..... 213 Perseus, a prisoner of the Romans, . . 215 Fate of the Greek states, . . . .216 Macedon newly constituted, . . . 217 Moral condition of Rome, . . . .218 Peace with Rhodes, . . . . 219 Wars in Gaul and Dalmatia, . . . 220 Prusias, Eumenes, . . . . .221 Events in Egypt. The Parthians, . . .221 War in Spain, ..... 222 M. Claudius Marcellus, . . . .222 Treachery of Sulpicius Galba to the Lusitanians, . 224 Lex Voconia, ...... 225 TABLE OF CONTENTS. Lex J£.lia et Fusia, Changes in the system of enlistment, Law against the ambitus, .... 227 THE THIRD PUNIC WAR, . 227 Masinissa, ..... War of the Carthaginians against Masinissa, Opinions in Rome with regard to Carthage, War against Carthage resolved upon at Rome, Conditions of the Romans, Outbreak of the war, . Masinissa tries to connect himself with Carthage, P. Cornelius Scipio Paul/if., Typography of Carthage, Scipio's attack on the town, The Carthaginian fleet destroyed, Conquest of the town, . Destruction of Carthage, THE PSEUDO-PHILIP. THE ACHJEAN WAR. DESTRUCTION OF CORINTH, . 244 Andriscus, ...••• 245 Victory of Metellus, The Achaean war, ..... 248 Its causes, ...... Successes of Metellus, .... 254 Mummius takes the command, . . . Destruction of Corinth, .... 256 Polybius, 256 WARS IN SPAIN. VIRIATHUS. DESTRUCTION OF NUMANTIA, . . 257 Viriathus, ...... 257 War with the Celtiberians, .... 260 War with Numantia, . . . .260 Q. Pompeius A.f^ . . . .261 C. Hostilius Mancinus conquered and hemmed in, 262 Ti. Gracchus, ..... 262 Scipio conquers Numantia, .... 263 Destruction of Numantia, . . . 264 TABLE OF CONTENTS. JU P.'ige SERVILE WAR IN SICILY. ACQUISITION OF THE KINGDOM OF PERGAMUS. ARISTONICUS. DO- MESTIC AFFAIRS, 264 State of Sicily, ..... 264 Servile war, ...... 265 Death of Attalus, ..... 2G6 Aristonicus, ...... 267 The consulate for the first time filled by two plebeians, 268 TIBERIUS SEMPRONIUS GRACCHUS, 269 Ager publicus and the Licinian law, . . 271 Agrarian law of Tib. Gracchus, . . .277 Opposition to this law, . . . .279 Dismissal of the tribune M. Octavius, . .281 Opposition of the Latins, . . . .282 Distribution of the inheritance of Attalus, . . 283 Camilla for elections ; murder of Tib. Gracchus, . 284 Tyranny of the victorious party, . • .287 C. Papirius Carbo, ..... 288 Death of P. Cornelius Scipio, . . . 289 Rebellion of Fregellae, . . . .291 CAIUS SEMPRONIUS GRACCHUS, . 291 C. Gracchus in Sardinia, .... 293 His tribuneship, ..... 293 Laws against the adversaries of his brother, . 294 Corn law, ...... 295 Relief of the soldiers, .... 296 The dispensation of justice transferred from the senate to the knights, ..... 296 Plan for the extension of the franchise, . . 299 Distribution of the provinces, . . . 300 Counter operations of M. Livius Drusus, . . 301 Reaction against C. Gracchus. His death, . . 303 Persecutions of his partizans, . . . 306 FOREIGN CONQUESTS DOWN TO THE WAR WITH JUGURTHA, . . 307 Conquest of the Balearic isles and of Dalmatia, . 307 War against the Allobroges, .... 307 The Cimbri and Scordiscans, . . . 308 Xii TABLE OP CONTENTS. Page THE WAR AGAINST JUGURTHA. Q. (LEC1LIUS METELLUS NUMIDICUS. C. MARIUS, . 309 Ballast, 309 State of Numidia after Masinissa's death, . . • Division of the empire. Jugurtha, M. ^milius Scaurus, ..... 312 Horace's want of historical lore, L. Calpurnius Bestia goes to Africa, . . . 814 Jugurtha in Rome, .... An inquiry instituted in Rome, . . • « Metellus goes to Africa, .... His success against Jugurtha, . . • * C. Marius, Marius elected consul, .... p1* End of the war of Jugurtha, WAR WITH THE CIMBRI AND TEUTONES, 322 Ethnography of the Cimbri, . . . • j The Teutones, .... Their victories over the Romans, . . • « Marius changes the Roman tactics, The Cimbri march into northern Italy, . . « Q. Lutatius Catulus, .... Victory of the Romans over the Ambrones, . . « Victory over the Teutones near Aquae Sextise, Victory over the Cimbri near Vercellae fcampi Raudii) 332 Triumph of Marius, . . • .333 MARIUS' SIXTH CONSULSHIP. L. APULEIUS SATURNINUS. C. SERV1LIUS GLAUCIA, 334 L. Apuleius Saturninus, .... C. Servilius Glaucia, . . • • • J Legislation of Saturninus, Agrarian law, . . • • • • j Opposition of Metellus, .... Defeat of Saturninus and Glaucia, . . . < M. LIVIUS DRUSUS, . . 340 Split between the different orders, Position of the allies, . • • M. Livius tries to reform the courts of law, TABLE OF CONTEXTS. xtii Page He tries to piocure the franchise for the Italians, . 346 Opposition to his plans, .... 347 Murder of Livius Drusus, .... 348 His laws repealed, .... 349 THE SOCIAL WAR. MITHRIDATES. CIVIL WAR BETWEEN THE PARTIES OF MARIUS AND SYL- LA. L. CORNELIUS CINNA, . . .350 The Roman proconsul in Ascalum murdered, . 351 The Italians establish an independent state, . . 352 Lex Julia, ...... 354: General view of the war, .... 355 Victory of C. Pompeius Strabo, . . . 356 Single Italian peoples receive the Roman franchise, . 357 New tribes, ..... 357 The Umbrians and Etruscans participate in the war, but soon receive the Roman franchise, . . 358 L. Cornelius Sylla, .... 359 Earlier history of Pontus, .... 361 Mithridates, . . . . .361 Massacre of the Roman citizens in Asia Minor, . 363 Sylla is appointed general against Mithridates, 364 P. Sulpicius, ...... 366 Sylla marches with his army against Rome, . 367 Marius' flight, ...... 368 Q. Pompeius murdered, .... 369 L. Cornelius Cinna, ..... 370 Civil war, ...... 370 Cinna deposed from the consulate, . . . 370 Q. Sertorius, . . . • . 371 Cinna marches against Rome, . . . 372 Marius consul for the seventh time, . . 373 The Samnites receive the franchise, . . . 374 Cinna murdered, ..... 375 THE FIRST MITHRIDATIC WAR. SYLLA RETURNS TO ROME. HIS DICTATORSHIP AND DEATH, . 375 Taking of Athens, .... 376 Peace with Mithridates, .... 376 Sylla returns to Italy, • . . . . 378 Civil war, ...... 379 Battle of Sacriportus, . . . .381 XIV TABLE OF CONTENTS. Page Pontius Telesinus marches against Rome; battle at the Collinegate, . . . . .382 Sylla's cruelty, ..... 383 Proscriptions, ..... 384 Military colonies, ..... 384 Sylla's laws, . . . . . .384 The senate remodelled, .... 384 Limitation of the tribuneship, . . . 387 The senate recovers the jurisdiction, . . 388 Increase of the sacerdotal offices, . . . 388 Increase of the number of praetors and quaestors, 389 The Cornelians, , 390 Sylla resigns the dictatorship, . . . 390 His death, . . . . . .391 LITERATURE. MANNERS AND MODE OF LIVING, 391 Sallust's histories. Sisenna, . . . 391 Claudius Quadrigarius, .... 392 Pacuvius, Terentius, Caecilius Statins, . . 392 Attius Lucilius, Laevius, .... 393 Prose. Manners and mode of living, . . 394 Cicero. Hortensius, ..... 394 COUNTER-REVOLUTION. LEPIDUS. SERTORIUS. POMPEY, . . 395 Designs of M. ^Emilius Lepidus, . . . 395 Catulus, ...... 396 Elements for a commotion, .... 396 Lepidus' undertaking against Rome miscarries. He and M. Brutus die, . . . .397 The war of Sertorius, . . . . .397 Sallust's histories, ... .397 Sertorius. Character of the people of the Val di Nor- cia, . . . . . . .397 Sertorius, abandoned in Spain by his troops, wanders about, ...... 399 He is recalled to Spain. His measures, . . 400 Cn. Pompey, ..... 401 His character, ..... 402 Sertorius conquers, .... 403 His murder, ...... 404 M. Peperna executed, .... 404 TABLE OF CONTENTS. XV Page SERVILE WAR. SPARTACUS. M. LICINIUS CRASSUS, . . .404 Pompey and Crassus consuls, . . . 404 Spartacus assembles about him the gladiators and slaves, ...... 405 Germans. Crixus, Oenomaus, . . . 406 Victory of Crassus, ..... 406 Atrocities of the war, .... 406 SECOND AND THIRD WAR AGAINST MITHRI- DATES, . . .407 Mithridates fulfils the stipulations of the peace, . 407 L. Murena, ..... 407 Sertorius concludes an allian^-e with Mithridates, 408 LECTURES ON ROMAN HISTORY, THE FIRST PUNIC WAR. EVERY body knows that Carthage is a colony of Tyre, founded seventy-two years before the received date of the building of Rome. This statement is quite histo- rical. It rests upon those highly important notices in Josephus' work against Apion, from Phoenician chro- nicles which he read in a Greek version of Menander of Ephesus. They are fully as genuine as Berosus and Sanchom'athon, and closely tally with the history of the Jewish kings : fraud on the part of Josephus is not to be thought of. The Romans knew of the historical books of the Phoenicians : after the destruction of Car- thage, they presented them to the library of the Numi- dian kings. If we wish for a true and authentic ac- count of the earliest history, we should be very thank- ful to have such dates as these. The assertion also of Timseus that Rome was built about the same time as Carthage, is not wide of the mark ; that is to say, if we reckon the Saecula at a hundred and ten years. TJtica (Athika K^Alf) is an older colony of Tyre than Car- thage : its foundation belongs to the age in which the power of the Phoenicians was at its height, and they had settlements in Cyprus, and were establishing them- selves in every quarter. Those of Cythera, Thasos, and elsewhere, are of much later date ; but it is likely that Cadiz (Gades) already existed when Carthage was built. II. A TUB FIRST PUNIC WAR. Carthage was originally founded under the name of Bozra (in Greek Bs, like the tribunes at Rome. The chief ofiices were given Ko.ffTiilni and wXoi/T/vSrv: in a later passage, Aris- THE FIRST PrNIC WAR. 7 totle says positively that the highest places were »»XT«/, and Polybius confirms it. People were not in the least ashamed to take money from the candidates: things were managed as in the small cantons in Switzerland, where the office of bailiff (Landvogt) was sold in the most shameless manner, or as in Venice. There the places were not quite bought in due form ; but it was well understood, that one had to pay for them: the great offices of state were sought after as &prowigione, as a means of restoring embarrassed fortunes. The rich were never punished, not even for murder ; but they paid damages, and there was a regular sale of cartes blanches for manslaughter. This was also the case with the Carthaginians. They were a commercial people, but this should by no means have bereft them of the feeling of honour : we do not find it to be so in Eng- land, for instance. Among the trading communities of the United States, similar sentiments are said to pre- vail as in Carthage. Such a disposition as this cannot but lead to utter ruin. The Carthaginians, owing to their rapacity, were grievously hateful to their subjects : the Libyans had to pay a fourth part of their produce, and in some extraordinary cases even half; besides which, there was whatever the governors might squeeze out of them on their own account ; and these, as Aris- totle already tells us, were positively sent down to suck the blood of those who were under their rule. This plan was adopted to keep individuals among the citi- zens in good humour. The contrast between the Car- thaginians and the Romans in their better times, is very striking. Some great men, of course, were exceptions, as they were able to act freely, like kings : when Hamil- car commanded in Spain, the Carthaginians were quite popular there. The nation was unwarlike ; they kept mercenaries, and had only a cavalry of their own : the mercenaries were faithless in a countless number of in- stances. The Carthaginians not unseldom left the same generals for many years in possession of their command , 8 THE FIRST PUNIC WAll. but the separation of it from the civil magistracy had this disadvantage, that they often rebelled. The gen- erals, however, became very familiarly acquainted with their armies, and a good captain was thus enabled to achieve quite incredible things, whilst a bad one might also do great mischief. Among the Romans, it was, of course, quite different. With them, there was a con- stant change ; men were in office for one year, and then, at most, one more as proconsuls. If we would understand the first Punic war, we ought to have in our mind's eye an outline of the natural fea- tures of Sicily. As every body knows, the core and frame-work of the whole island is JEtna, from which a chain of mountains stretches close along the sea, and is continued on the opposite shore as far as Hipponium in Bruttium. For the mountain ranges in the South of Italy belong geologically to Sicily, whilst the hills of the Northern Apennines are a different ridge. The Apenninus so ends that the two sets of mountains are connected together by low hills, on the spot where the Greeks had more than once the intention of making a canal. The mountain ridge, therefore, runs north from uEtna as far as Messina on the eastern coast ; to the south, it leaves a considerable plain near Leontini to- wards the sea ; between Syracuse and the western coun- try, there is only a low range of hills. West of JStna, it continues under the names of the Heraean and Ne- brodian mountains. From Pelorus to Himera, it is quite close to the sea, which washes its foot ; so that sometimes there is not even a road between. From Himera onward, there is a small strip of coast, and the mountains fall off in height : at some distance from Palermo, the country becomes quite flat ; the only emi- nence is the hill in which is the cavern of St. Rosalia (the ancient Hercta).* The range of mountains then goes further to the west, and rises again : Eryx (Monte * Monte Pellesrino.— Germ. Edit. THE FIRST PUNIC WAR. 9 San Giuliano) is the largest mountain after ^Etna ; it towers in a quite extraordinary way from among the lower groups. The country round Enna is flat. The southern coast to Agrigentum is a large plain, by Gela and Camarina also it is flat ; south of a line drawn from Agrigentum to Catana, there is either nothing but hil- locks, or a dead level. — According therefore to this na- ture of the ground, campaigns had to be managed. Otherwise it would be incomprehensible why the Ro- mans did not march from Messina to Palermo by the northern coast, but went to the southern part, where they could have had no other base but Syracuse to rest upon. To this, my attention was directed by the cam- paigns of the English in 1812, in which likewise the troops could not go by land from Messina to Palermo. The first Punic war may be divided into five pe- riods : — 1. From 488 to 491, when the Romans carry on the war without a fleet. The Carthaginians are mas- ters of the sea; the Romans have the greatest difficulty in crossing, and can only get at them in Sicily by land. 2. From 492 to 496, to the knding of Regulus in Africa. 3. From 496 to 497, the campaign of Regulus in Af- rica. 4. From the destruction of the army of Regulus to the victory of L. Ceecilius Metellus near Panor- mus. Fortune is nearly equally balanced; the Romans lose two fleets by storms, the Carthagi- nians have the upperhand in Sicily : nevertheless the Romans are victorious at last. 5. From the beginning of the year 502 to 511 ; from the contest for Lilibaeum and Drepana, to the vic- tory near the J2gatian isles. The ten years' strug- gle is confined to an exceedingly narrow space, being important rather in a military than in an historical point of view. The diversion of Hamil- 10 THE FIRST PUNIC WAR. car Barcas, of which, unfortunately, we know so little, is, owing to the taking of Hercta and Eryx, one of the most remarkable in the military history of any age ; it shows a great man, who creates new resources for himself, and avails himself of them. Yet for the history of nations this period is not so important. The Carthaginian system of warfare is quite unknown to us ; we can only say, that, where the Carthaginians themselves were in arms, they were drawn up in a phalanx just like the Greeks. The Spaniards very likely stood in catervce, and fought with small swords, and in cetris, that is to say, linen coats of mail. The Gauls, no doubt, fought in great masses. In the year 490, the third of the war, the Romans undertook to besiege Agrigentum with two armies. This town was of great extent ; yet, as a city it was but a mere shadow of what it had been a hundred and forty years earlier, before its first destruction by the Cartha- ginians. Within its high and strong walls, a consider- able army of the enemy had now thrown itself. The name of the Punic general was Hannibal. The Cartha- ginians were called by their first-names only, and one might be easily led to think that they were all related to each other, as there were so few of these names, Han- nibal, Hanno, Hamilcar, and some others. These cor- respond to our Christian names, to the Roman prceno- mina, as Gaius, &c. They certainly had, all of them, family names also, which, however, at that time were not yet made use of to designate individuals : they had even bye-names, but these have been partly lost to us. The generals who bear the name of Hannibal, are in the whole of Carthaginian history so insignificant, when set beside that great man who gave the name its renown, that little mention only is made of them. Hannibal had posted himself with fifty thousand men within the wide and waste precincts of Agrigentum ; the two consular armies ad- vanced on the south against the town, entrenched them- THE FIRST PUNIC WAR. 11 selves in two camps, and constructed two lines against the city, and against any one who might attempt to relieve it. The Carthaginian generals were very bad in the beginning of the war ; they either made no use at all of the elephants, or only a limited one, and they were very loth to give battle to the Romans. Hanni- bal had now imprudently allowed himself to be thus hemmed in, and as Agrigentum does not lie close to the sea, he could not get any succours from thence : yet he succeeded in conveying to the Carthaginians, by single messengers and letters, his entreaties for relief. They indeed, when he had been besieged five months, sent Hanno with a large army and fifty elephants. This general pitched a strong camp near Heraclea ; took Er- bessus, the arsenal of the Romans ; and by means of barri- cades of felled trees, &c., so shut them in, that they were much distressed for want of supplies, and on account of the state of health of their troops : for the Carthagi- nians were masters of the sea, and the Numidian horse- men, the Cossacks of the ancients, made it exceedingly difficult for them to forage. It seemed as if they would be obliged to give up the siege, and to retreat ; yet they could not bring themselves to do so, showing in this in- stance also their perseverance, and on the contrary, they kept up the blockade so strictly, that Hannibal found no means of bettering the condition of his- troops. When under these circumstances two months had gone by, Hanno may have had reasons to attack; yet the Romans gained a complete victory, and set themselves up again by the booty which they got in his camp. AJ1 this time, Hiero had given them every possible help : without him they would have perished. Hannibal, who had been brought to extremities, took advantage of the moment when the Romans were enjoying themselves the night after their victory, to make preparations for a sally. The soldiers filled the ditches of the Roman lines with fascines and sacks of straw, climbed over the ramparts, drove back the outposts, and thus fought their 12 THE FIRST PUNIC WAR. way through : all that the Romans could do, was to an- noy them in the rear. Whoever was able to bear arms, got off in this way ; but the inhabitants of the town were for the most part left behind, as well as the sick and the weak. Agrigentum was, on the following morn- ing, sacked and pillaged, like a town taken by storm. Here the Romans made up for all their privations : the whole of the unfortunate population was swept away. . After this frightful event, a year passed by without any remarkable occurrence. The Carthaginians strong- ly provisioned and fortified their other stations in the west ; yet they also acted on the offensive. Their fleet cruised off the coasts of Italy, which it laid waste ; the northern coasts of Sicily likewise surrendered to their power from fear, whilst the Romans kept the inner island and the eastern coast. The conquest of Agrigentum gave the latter quite different ideas with regard to the war. Formerly, they merely wanted to have Messana and Syracuse as dependent allies ; but now their object was to drive the Carthaginians altogether from the island, as Dionysius, Agathocles, and Pyrrhus had done : they saw, however, that this could not be done without a fleet. It was the same difficulty as at Athens, where, in the Peloponnesian war, and in the times immediate- ly following it, they had no other ships but pentecon- ters, lembi, and triremes (with from 200 to 220 men, who were partly rowers and partly marines, and with a deck ; the penteconters, which had 50 men, * were open, and the benches for the rowers in both were placed across, before and above each other) ; these vessels had been outdone long since, and larger ones were needed. In Syracuse, the cradle of mechanical art, quadriremes, and soon afterwards quinqueremes, were first mounted, ships of a larger class, which were not round, and which » This number is stated in the Lex. Rhetoricum (Bekker Anecd. I. p. 298). Herodotus (VII. 184.) mentions eighty as the number of the crews of the penteconters. The number given in the text, rests only on one Manuscript of the lectures, but on a very trustworthy one. — Germ. Ed. THE FIRST PUNIC WAR. 13 might properly be called ships of the line ; for, the dif- ference of the triremes and quinquercmes cannot have consisted merely in the number of the benches and the rowers, but it must really have been in the build itself, otherwise no great skill would have been required to construct them. These quinqueremes had already for a long time been in use, especially in the Macedonian, Sicelian, and Punic fleets ; but neither the Romans, nor the Antiates had them. The Romans had also triremes, and wherever the Antiate vessels are mentioned, they are triremes. — The oars had the same effect as our steam boats, being independent of wind and tide : the ancients could, however, sail very well besides. A quinquereme had three hundred rowers and a hun- dred and twenty marines ; to these rowers the triremes could oppose but a hundred and twenty, who therefore were able to do as little against them, as a frigate or a brigantine would against a ship of the line. This ac- counts for the statement, that the Romans had had no fleet at all ; and yet they had built triremes for the pas- sage to Sicily. They wanted therefore a model, from which the ships might be built on correct principles, so that they could be worked with ease ; and they might certainly have sent for a shipbuilder to Greece, or to Egypt, to Ptolemy Philadelphus, with whom they were already allied, and have fetched a model thence ; for the ancients indeed built from models. But it so happen- ed that a Carthaginian ship of war was driven ashore, and from it they built a hundred and twenty quinque- remes.* These were indeed very unwieldy, and the Romans had not the number of sailors which they wanted, that is to say, more than 30,000. They were therefore obliged to man them with levies from the in- land districts, and with slaves, as the Russian ships are by conscription in the interior of the empire ; — for, the seamen from Etruria and the Greek towns were by no * One hundred quinqueremes, and twenty quadriremes. R. H. Ill, note 1053.— Germ. Edit. ] 4 THE FIBST PUNIC WAR. means sufficient (Polybius goes too far, in stating that they had had no able seamen at all) : these were trained to ply the oars upon scaffoldings on dry ground. This drilling, as it is told to us, seems to be utterly ridicu- lous ; and the Carthaginians must have been altogether unlike our nations, if on this occasion a whole crowd of caricatures were not published among them. There was in those times the same contrast between a Roman and a Carthaginian ship, which there is now-a-days be- tween a Russian and an English or American man of war. But the Romans, being great in this as they were in all things, devised the means of overcoming this dis- advantage. Their fleet was unable to make head against the Carthaginians in the ordinary tactics ; and it was very likely at that very time, and not at a later one, that the idea was conceived of ridding the seafight of all artificial evolutions, and rather making ship fight against ship. For it required the greatest skill to manage and steer the ships against wind and tide in the same way as a rider manages his horse, so as to shatter the enemy's vessel by means of the rostrum, and to tear off the benches of the rowers ; this was more than the Romans dared to think of. Wherever an enemy is to be met who is greatly superior in skill, the only way of conquering is by employing masses, or some unexpected invention. Thus Carnot gained the victory for the French, by opposing masses to the thin lines of the ene- my ; the battle of Wattignies (15, 16 Oct. 1793) is the turning point of the modern history of warfare, the end of the old, and the beginning of the new tactics. Gen- eral Hoche had recourse to the same system in Lorraine ; by masses the Americans also beat the English ships, which, otherwise, they would have never succeeded in doing. The Romans invented boarding-bridges made of wood, which were wide enough for two men to run upon abreast, and protected on both sides by railings ; on the prow of every ship a large mast was set up, resting on which the bridge was drawn up aloft, the THE FIRST PUNIC WAR. 15 upturned end having an iron ring through which a hawser was passed : the bridge was raised or lowered by a windlass, and it fastened itself to the hostile vessel oy means of a grappling-iron. Thus the advantage of supe- rior skill which the Carthaginian rowers possessed, was done away with. The Romans, moreover, had their best legions on board, and in all likelihood the Carthagi- nians had only middling or bad marine soldiers, as these were not picked. This was in the year 492, according to Cato ; in 494, according to Varro. The first attempt was not, however, successful, or in the beginning all the ships were not yet armed in this manner. A squadron was caught at a great disadvantage near the Liparian isles, owing to the bad look-out of the Roman com- mander Cn. Cornelius, and many ships were lost ; but the Carthaginians also, some time afterwards, got right into the midst of the Roman squadron, and several of their ships were taken. But the decisive affair was the naval victory of the consul C. Duilius off Mylae. The Carthaginians engaged in the battle with a feeling of great contempt for their enemy, having 130 vessels against 100 Roman ones; but they soon found how much they were mistaken, when the Romans began to board, and the sea-fight was changed into the nature of a land one. Fifty Carthaginian ships were taken ; then the Romans, quite intoxicated with their victory, land- ed in Sicily, and relieved Segesta (which, like Rome, boasted of its descent from Troy). Duilius was the first who led forth a naval triumph at Rome. He got the right of being lighted by a torch carried before him, when returning home of an evening from a feast, and of being accompanied by a flute player ; moreover, as is generally known, the columna rostrata was erected to him. What this really was, we do not exactly know ; perhaps it was a brazen pillar, cast from the beaks of the ships which had been taken : a pillar from which brazen beaks stick out, as it is generally represented, is quite a modern, and altogether ungrounded conceit. Oa 16 THE FIRST PUNIC WAR. the column there was an inscription, in which the vic- tory and the booty won by Duilius were set forth. A small remnant of it is still in existence ; yet the present tablet has not been put up in the time of Duilius him- self, as some of the Roman antiquaries have also per- ceived. It is built of Greek marble, which in those days was not yet known in Rome. According to Tacitus, it was struck by lightning in the reign of the emperor Tiberius, and restored by Germanicus ; but the old lan- guage and spelling were still faithfully kept. With that age, the form of the letters also agrees : those on the tombs of the Scipios are altogether different. After this victory, the hopes of the Romans were un- bounded : the war in Sicily was pursued with redoubled vigour. In the following year, the Roman fleet went to Sardinia. The conquest of this island was difficult, as on the coasts the Punic language and manners had spread ; yet as all the subjects there had been kept in an unwarlike condition owing to the jealousy of the mother state, the attack was somewhat facilitated. But for all that, it had no important result. The two following years were spent in making con- quests in Sicily, besides this expedition to Sardinia. In this war, A. Atilius Calatinus got into an impassable part of the country ; and a tribune, whose name is stat- ed differently, M. Calpurnius Flamma, or Q. Caeditius Laberius, sacrificed himself with a small band for the sake of the army, as Decius did in Samnium. Accord- ing to Cato, in the Origines, he was found after the bat- tle, dangerously wounded and still scarcely breathing, among the dead ; but he afterwards recovered. In the third year after the victory of Duilius, the Romans appeared with a considerable naval force before Sicily ; and a drawn battle was fought off Tyndaris on the northern coast, of which the Carthaginians were masters, from Lilybaeum nearly to Mylse. But as the war in Sicily was not decided, and year by year a few small places only were taken, while the Carthaginians THE FIRST PUNIC WAR. 17 still held all the important possessions in their province, the Romans in 496 resolved upon transporting the war to Africa, as there was no hope of its being ended with- out some great blow being struck. The example of Agathocles had shown how vulnerable the Carthagi- nians were in Africa. They therefore intended to force the Carthaginians to make peace; at that time they would indeed have contented themselves with Sicily. They now doubled their armaments, and built an im- mense fleet; the Carthaginians likewise, when they heard of it, built a very great number of ships. Such huge masses do not give one much pleasure in history, as even barbarians are able to get them up : the supe- riority of talent and skill over physical force has no chance on such occasions. The victory also of Duilius by means of boarding bridges, is, when closely looked at, only the result of a clumsy device by which the true science of the Carthaginian navy was baffled. In the seven years' war, when line -tactics were in vogue, the art of war, as an art, was of a far higher order than it is, now that armies fight in masses : the masses likewise of artillery mark the evident decline of the intellectual spirit and of humanity in warfare. The Romans put to sea with three hundred and thirty ships, most of which were quinqueremes, and the Carthaginians with three hundred and fifty. Polybius himself is amazed at these huge masses, and remarks in his preface, how even the great battles of the Macedonian kings, of Demetrius, Ptolemy, and others, and in later times, those of the Rhodians, shrink to nothing in comparison. They also outvied each other from henceforth in the size of their ships, some of which had even as many as nine banks of oars, like the one which was built by Archimedes for Hiero, who sent it to Alexandria. These preposterous monsters surpassed in bulk our ships of the line. Men afterwards came back to the use of the very lightest vessels, such as liburnce and lembi; of these we are un- able to give a clear idea. In the most brilliant days of II. B 1 8 THE FIRST PUNIC WAR. the Byzantines and Venetians, battles were fought with very small ships. The Romans were 140,000 rowers and marines, the land forces alone amounting to 40,000 : they had also a number of transports, especially for the cavalry (x« 5, the numbers of the J/^ X^ transports, squadrons. The Carthaginians, who fell in with them near Ecno- mus, had a more judicious arrangement. Their left wing, being about the fourth part of the whole of their fleet, sailed in a long line along the coast ; and joining it at a right angle was the main body of their large ar- mament, which, ship by ship, stood out far into the sea. The Romans passed by the line along the coast, and at- tacked the salient line. It was not the plan of the Car- thaginian admiral, that this should withstand the end of the wedge which was forcing itself in ; they therefore set sail, and seemed to flee, so as to separate the Ro- mans from their third and fourth lines, and the Romans pursued them. But two parts of the long line formed again, and fell upon the Romans, who had detached themselves from the third squadron; the third part, which was sailing in the open sea, returned and attack- ed the fourth Roman squadron ; and in the meanwhile, the line which was off the coast, came up and engaged the third squadron, which now abandoned the trans- ports to their fate. Thus arose three distinct sea-fights : the first and second Roman squadrons conquered easily ; the fourth had a doubtful victory ; and the third was hard pressed, but the centre turned back to defend it. The boarding-bridges were also employed in this action with great effect. The result was the complete rout of the Carthaginians : thirty ships were sunk, part of them being driven ashore and wrecked, and sixty-four taken ; 20 THE FIRST PUNIC WAR. from thirty to forty thousand men fell into the power of the Romans. After this defeat, the beaten fleet made its escape to Africa, and went to protect Carthage against an attack ; the men had lost all strength and spirit. The Romans had the sea clear before them to carry their plan into execution, and the two consular armies, that of Manliua and that of Regulus, proceeded to Africa. They landed on the south side of the headland of Hermaeum, over- against Carthage, at the mouth of the gulf of Tunis, near a town which the Romans call Clupea, the Greeks Aspis, (the Punic name we do not know,) a place, which they took after a creditable defence. They now made it their arsenal, and spread from thence into the heart of the country. The really efficient armies of the enemy were stationed in Sicily ; the Carthaginians had made sure of baffling the undertaking, and were therefore quite unprepared in Africa. They had fortified colonies on the coast only ; as for the interior, with the excep- tion of a few municipia, they had the same policy as the Vandals, who, fearing rebellions, pulled down all the walls of the towns, just as the Lombards did afterwards in Italy. Wherever therefore the Romans came, they marched in : a foreign conqueror was looked upon by the Libyans as a deliverer ; for, although the Carthagi- nians were no barbarians, yet they were very hard masters. For they followed the system, which is found through- out the East, that the sovereign is the owner of the soil, and the possessor has the enjoyment of it only so long as it pleases the lord and master. They also wanted immense sums of money for their Celtic and Iberian mercenaries, and were therefore obliged to squeeze them out of their subjects. In the war of Agathocles, the consequences of this system had already been seen. Indeed the spirit of the Africans had been crushed, so that they did not break out in open rebellion, as they did in his time ; for the Carthaginians had taken a fell revenge after his departure. Yet they did not aid Car- THE FIRST PUNIC WAR. 21 thage in any way. A most inconceivable order now came from Rome, that one of the consuls, L. Manlius, should return home, it being perhaps believed, that the force of Regulus was sufficient by itself: Manlius there- fore sailed back with almost the whole of the fleet, and brought over the booty. The Carthaginians retreated into inaccessible parts of the country : Regulus never- theless defeated them near Adis. Their militia troops were exceedingly timid ; it was easy for the Romans to drive them out of their strongholds. Regulus stationed himself not far from Carthage: he took the fortified town of Tunes, and encamped near the river Bagradas : the Carthaginians were pressed most closely. In this camp, as the ancients generally relate, (Livy also has it,) a serpent, which was a hundred and twenty ells in length, is said to have made its appearance, and to have torn to pieces a great many Romans, until the soldiers battered it with catapults and ballistce. This tale, in the midst of an account which is quite historical, is most surprising. That earth and sea may contain creatures which occur so rarely, that one is inclined to take them for fabulous, cannot indeed be positively denied ; it may have been a giant serpent. But in all likelihood, this story, like so many others, has its origin in Naevius' Bettum Punicum, which poet himself served as a soldier in that war. At all events, it would be wonderful if the size of the dragon had amounted in ells to exactly that number which is so often met with in Roman measure- ments, namely, 12 X 10. The Carthaginians had utterly lost courage, and they could not withdraw their army from Sicily without giv- ing up that island altogether : they therefore sent an embassy to Regulus, and sued for peace. Regulus' fame has been very much exaggerated by apophthegmatical histories ; he is undeservedly represented as a martyr : in the heyday of his good fortune, he showed himself ruthless, intoxicated with victory, and ungenerous. We have a story of him, that he had then asked the 22 THE FIBST PUNIC WAR. senate for his recall, that he might attend to his farm; but we know on the contrary from Polybius, that he had particularly set his heart upon bringing the war to a brilliant end, before a successor arrived. So much the more senseless was it in him to ask of the Carthaginians impossibilities, and to offer them much worse terms than they really obtained at the conclusion of the war, just as if he had meant to drive them to despair. Had he stipulated for the evacuation of Sicily and the payment of a contribution, the Carthaginians would have been quite willing ; but he had the preposterous idea of crush- ing Carthage with one blow. His conditions were quite insane: even had they been besieged, the Carthagi- nians could not have fared worse. They were to ac- knowledge the supremacy of Rome ; to make an offen- sive and defensive alliance with the Romans ; to enter into no treaty without the permission of the Romans ; to yield up all their ships of war but one, and to have nothing but triremes ; to give up Sicily, Sardinia, Cor- sica, and the Lipari isles ; to abandon their Italian al- lies ; to deliver up the prisoners and deserters ; to ran- som their own captives ; to pay all the expenses of the war, and a contribution besides. The Carthaginians declared that they would rather perish ; and luckily for them the Romans carried on the war badly. Instead of establishing themselves within the gulf of Tunis, oppo- site Carthage, as they ought to have done, they had now sent off their fleet ; the Carthaginians therefore could make use of their ships to hire troops everywhere. Among these, there were also many from Greece ; one of them, the celebrated Xanthippus, who was not, as Diodorus says, a Spartan, but as we learn from Poly- bius, a Neodamode who in his education had been sub- jected to the laws of the Spartans («•«,- A.«.X.Urepana, and Eryx. These vessels, even those which were ships of war, laden with corn, and manned with marines who were by no means picked, arrived at the ^Egatian islands, from whence they were to cross over to the coast, along which the Roman fleet was theix cruising. The plan of the Carthaginians was, after having landed, to take in the best troops of Hamilcar as marines, and then to risk a sea-fight. The Roman fleet was under the command of the consul C. Lutatius Catulus, and of the prsetor Q. Valerius Falto. They also had their doubts. A battle could not be avoided ; it was therefore best to attack at once, while the Cartha- ginian ships were still heavily laden. Corn, when it 13 only pitched in loosely, and not put into sacks, is a very bad cargo, as it shifts with every wind. If then these THE FIRST PUNIC WAR. 39 were allowed to land, they would return with lightened ships, and with marines from Hamilcar's army who were not afraid of fighting the Romans; yet the true advan- tage of the latter was indeed in the lightness of their galleys and the excellence of their troops. There was only this objection, that the Carthaginians had the wind in their favour, whilst the Romans would have with great difficulty to bear up against them with their oars, — a circumstance which among the ancients was very unfavourable in a seafight, as a ship which was going against the wind, offered a much greater surface to the stroke of the enemy, Hanno, the Carthaginian general, tried to cross over with full sails, and perhaps also with oars (the ancients had latteen sails) ; thus they came upon the Romans with double force, and it seemed a great risk for the latter to accept the battle. Nevertheless they did not shrink from it. The Carthaginians were hardly able to move their ships, and the bad condition of their troops gave the Romans such an advantage, that they won a complete victory. Both had played their last stake, so that the Carthaginians were ruined. The Romans took seventy of their ships, sank a number of them, and scattered the rest. It was impossible for the Carthaginians to provision their distressed garrison, and still less could they quick- ly fit out a new fleet. They therefore resolved to make peace, and, according to Polybius, chose Hamilcar to negociate it. Sicily, of course, was to be ceded; two thousand two hundred talents (3,300,000 dollars) were to be paid, and all the Roman prisoners and deserters to be given up, while they should have to ransom their own prisoners : the assent of the Roman people was re- served. The demand that Hamilcar and his troops should lay down their arms, and march out as prisoners of war, was indignantly rejected. The Roman people insisted on an additional charge of a thousand talents, these to be paid at once, and the two thousand two hun- dred by instalments within ten years ; and likewise on 40 THE FIRST PUNIC WAR. the cession of all the islands between Sicily and Car- thage, which shows that the Carthaginians still held the Lipari isles. This was necessary, if a lasting peace was to be concluded. Thus ended this war of twenty-four years, which in- deed gained Sicily for the Romans, but turned it into a wilderness : the whole of the western part of the island especially was laid desolate, and from that time it has never recovered. There was yet, it is true, some civili- zation left ; Greek art still lingered there. The work of devastation was completed in the second Punic war ; in the Servile war, the island was nothing but a dreary waste, and however wretched its state is now, — the modern Sicilians, next to the Portuguese, rank the low- est among the nations of Europe, — yet it was still more lonely and desolate in the times of Verres. Under the Roman emperors, there was no amendment : hence in the itineraries we find that the roads do not pass by towns,— for these had perished,— but by farms. Thus dissolved into large estates Sicily continues until the days of Gregory the Great, when we may again have an insight into its condition from the letters of that pon- tiff. The present population, in spite of its miserable government, has risen nearly to the double of what it was : under Verres it was below a million. It is as if the soil had lost all its heart and fruitfulness. The small kingdom of Syracuse was an exception, owing to the great wisdom with which it was ruled by Hiero. SICILY A ROMAN PROVINCE. 41 SICILY A ROMAN PROVINCE. PRAETOR PEREGRINUS. WAR WITH THE FALISCANS. MUTINY OF THE MERCENARIES IN CARTHAGE. THE FIRST ILLYRIAN WAR. THE LEX FLAMIN1A FOR THE DIVISION OF THE AVER GALUCV3 PICElfUS. WAR AGAINST THE CISALPINE GAULS. THE SECOND ILLYRIAN WAR. THE CARTHAGINIANS FOUND AN EMPIRE IN SPAIN. AFTER the peace, the Romans formed Sicily into a pro- vince. In a province, a Roman commander, either still holding a curule office or with a prolonged imperium, carried on the government, and had the same power over the country as in times of war, by virtue of the lex de imperio. It is a false notion, that in the provinces the inhabitants had no right of ownership ; they had in- deed, though not according to Roman, but according to provincial law. There were in the provinces civitates liberce, civitates foederatce, and subjects. The confederate states were treated like the Italian allies : some of them had the land as their own, and paid taxes on it, some- times in proportion to the produce, and sometimes at a fixed rate ; others indeed lost their ownership in it, so that it might be disposed of by the Roman republic ; but retained the enjoyment of it on paying a rent. This was done when the provinces rebelled again and again, and were reconquered ; and thus it came to pass that in several states the land was almost entirely forfeited to the Roman republic, whilst in others it was not so at all. This was not understood by the later writers, as Theophilus, and even Gaius himself already. From that time, there was generally a praetor and a quaestor in the province of Sicily. Hiero remained independent as did the free cities in Italy, and likewise the state of the Ma- mertines, Tauromenium, Centoripa, and other towns in the interior. The war was ruinous to the Romans, whom it im- PRAETOR PEREGRINUS. poverished, and consequently to their morals also ; for wounds like these do not always heal after the return of peace. During a struggle of this kind, contractors and the very dregs of the rabble grow rich, and the old citizens become poor : the first Punic war is therefore one of the first causes of the degeneracy of the Roman people. In the course of this war, there must have been many changes of which we have few or no re- cords; we only know of some small matters. In the year of the city 506, as we have now been able to learn from Lydus de Magistratibus, a second prastor was ap- pointed, who was to administer the laws to the peregri- ni. A great change had therefore taken place, that foreigners were to have a persona in Rome, instead of being obliged to be represented by a citizen as former- ly : in this we acknowledge an important diminution of the spirit of faction. Suetonius says of a Claudius, who without doubt belongs to the beginning of the first Pu- nic war, that he had resolved upon ruling Italy by means of the clients : this is one of the proofs which show that the clientship had a dangerous character, and how beneficial it was to dissolve that connexion. Yet the praetor was not restricted to his civil jurisdiction; Q. Valerius commanded the fleet besides, and another praetor we meet with at a later period in Etruria. We also find in Livy by no means in every year a praetor for the peregrini. The phrase praetor peregrinus is a bar- barism ; Livy, in the fourth decade, always uses a cir- cumlocution instead of it. * Another great change from an accidental cause, ia little noticed. Dionysius says, that until the *«,«*« w«x tpos, the state had yearly given fifty thousand drachmas for the public festivals. This was now chang- ed, and the Greek system of Liturgies was introduced, CHANGE IN THE SENATE. ' 43 by which rich men had to defray the cost of the festi- vals as a public burthen. As the aedileship was the stepping-stone to higher offices, this measure gave rise to an important political revolution. Polybius has not remarked this. He finds fault with the Carthaginians for their practice of selling offices, and sets the cus- tom of the Romans in direct contrast with theirs ; yet it was then just the same at Borne. Fabricius, and men like him, could now no longer have worked their way to high office, without having to encounter the greatest difficulties. In the nature of the senate, there was likewise a great change effected shortly before the first Punic war. The senate had at first been a representation of the people, and then of the curies ; afterwards the will of the cen- sors was paramount in its selection, and this was a blessing for the state. The composition of the Roman senate may perhaps have been best about this time : on the other hand, this power was in truth anomalous and dangerous, as the example of Ap. Claudius had shown. But now the senate was indirectly chosen by the people for life. The quaestors, of whom there had originally been two, then four, and now eight, became the semina- rium senatus: he who had been quaestor had already the right seittentiam dicendi in senatu, and might in case of a vacancy at the next census, if there was no parti- cular charge brought against him, reckon with certainty upon getting into the senate. In this way, the senate was then changed into a sort of elective council ; only the expulsion of unworthy members still belonged to the province of the censor. Still more completely was the senate chosen by the people in the seventh century, when the tribunes of the people also got into it. As may be well imagined, it was with much difficulty that the Romans recovered from so exhausting a strug- gle. Their losses had been immense; besides other things, there were seven hundred ships of war : of the arrangements and measures which they adopted after 44 WAR WITH THE FALISCANS. the restoration of peace, we know but little. Soon after- wards, a war broke out against the Faliscans, which was ended in six days. It is almost incomprehensible, when the whole of Italy, with the exception of some little troubles in Samnium, had remained in obedience all the time of the Punic War, that after its conclusion such a dwarf could now have risen against the giant. This can only be accounted for in this way, that perhaps at that period a truce had expired, and the Romans did not wish to renew the former conditions. The town was destroyed, in order to strike terror into the Italians by the example. Yet the Carthaginians were in a still worse plight than the Romans. Their distress was the same ; they had also been beaten, and had every year to pay a por- tion of the heavy contribution ; and the Romans more- over were no indulgent creditors. They had likewise to pay off their mercenaries who had returned from Sicily ; but they had no money. Besides all this, the state was badly governed, and Hamilcar, the greatest man of his age, was thwarted by a whole faction. The friends of Hamilcar are likewise called factio; yet this means nothing else but people from all ranks, the best part of the nation, who sided with the distinguished man whom the majority attempted to cry down. Such was the condition of Carthage, that the great resources which Providence gave her in Hamilcar and Hannibal, led to nothing but her ruin ; had she followed the advice of Hamilcar, and not spared her rich citizens, but made another mighty effort, she might have paid off the mer- cenaries, and have raised a new army. Instead of this, the Carthaginians foolishly tried to bargain with these barbarians, and with this view brought together the whole army. The consequence was, that it threw off its obedience to them, and a dreadful war broke out, which became a national one for Africa, as the Libyans, even with enthusiasm, rushed into the arms of the troops : the women gave their trinkets for the support of the CARTHAGINIAN MERCENARIES. 45 war. Even old Phoenician colonies, such as Utica, Hippo, Clupea, rose against Carthage, so that the power of the city was often driven back almost within its own walls. The Roman deserters, who were afraid of being given up to their own government, placed them- selves at the head of the insurrection, especially a slave from Campania of the name of Spendius : Carthage was brought to the brink of destruction. The Romans, dur- ing this war, at first behaved in a high-minded manner ; " and here we meet with the first traces of navigation laws, and of those claims on neutrals which have caused BO many quarrels in modern history. The Romans in fact decreed, that no ships of the rebels should be allow- ed to come to Italy ; and that, on the other hand, none should sail from thence to the harbours of the rebels in Africa. The Italian ship-masters did not observe this; but they went whithersoever their interest called them : the Carthaginians had therefore a right to seize all the Roman ships which were bound for such a harbour, to confiscate the cargo, and to detain the crews as pri- soners ; and for this they might appeal to the Roman proclamation. The Romans had even let the Carthagi- nians levy troops in Italy; they also negociated with them for the liberation of the prisoners : the Carthagi- nians gave them up, and the Romans, on their side, re- leased those whom they had still kept since the war. They likewise facilitated the traffic with Carthage. The war lasted three years and four months ; it was waged with a cruelty which is beyond all conception, very much like the thirty years' war, which was a war of fiends. At last, owing to the generalship of the great Hamilcar Barcas, and the horrors committed by the mercenaries themselves, it was put down, and revenge was taken. Then the envy of the Romans was aroused. The mercenaries in Sardinia had likewise risen against the Carthaginians, and had murdered many of those who were settlers there, though probably only the officers and magistrates ; for as late as Cicero's times, the popu- 46 CARTHAGINIAN MERCENAEIES. lation of the sea-port towns of Sardinia was Punic. Against the mercenaries, the Sards now rose in their turn, and drove them out of the island, renouncing also their allegiance to the Carthaginians. After the war in Africa was ended, Carthage wished to reconquer Sardi- nia; but the rebels placed themselves under the Ro- mans, who, with shameful hypocrisy, declared themselves bound not to abandon those who had committed them- selves to their protection, and, when the Carthaginians fitted out a fleet against Sardinia, asserted that this would be a war against themselves. It was therefore impossible for the Carthaginians to carry on this war ; and Hamilcar, who like all men of sterling mind, was . for letting go what could not be kept, without giving way to maudlin sorrow, advised them to yield in this matter until better times : on this, the Carthaginians swore to have their revenge, but for the present not to make war. They made a new peace, in which they gave up Corsica and Sardinia, and had besides to pay twelve hundred talents. This conduct is one of the most de- testable misdeeds in the Roman history. To the east of Italy, since the Peloponnesian war, an empire had arisen in a country where formerly there were only single tribes. This was the Illyrian kingdom. How it rose, we cannot exactly tell : it did not spring from the Taulantians. Since the days of Philip espe- cially, larger states had formed themselves out of the small ones ; and perhaps it was created by Bardylis, who in the times of that king founded an empire in those parts. Nor do we know anything for certain about the royal city: it was probably in the neighbourhood of Ragusa ; the worst pirates must have dwelt in northern Dalmatia. For some time (about the year 520), in the then broken state of Greece, they, like the Albanians of the present day, roamed everywhere by land and by sea ; and wasting the coasts, particularly the unfortu- nate Cyclades, they dragged away the full-grown inhab- itants, and cut off all traffic. Perhaps only the Mace- THE FIRST ILLYRIAN WAR. 47 donians and Rhodians opposed to them any resistance ; yet they were very likely not sorry to see piracy car- ried on against others, as is also the case with modern nations, which rule the seas. The Illyrians, however, meddled also with the Romans ; and the more so as their boldness increased, when under Agron, their king, the gain from their piracy grew greater, and having a run of luck, they made prizes on the coast of Epirus and Acar- nania. The Romans dispatched an embassy thither. Agron had died in the meanwhile, and his son Pinnes was under the guardianship of his mother, queen Teuta, who held the regency. She answered, that on the part of the state no wrong would be done to the Romans ; but that it was an ancient right and custom of the Illy- rians, for every single captain to take whatever fell in his way. One of the Roman envoys, probably a son of the great Ti. Coruncanius, now replied that it was the custom of the Romans to amend the bad customs of other nations. For this she had the ambassadors mur- dered, whereupon the Romans sent a fleet and army over to Illyria. The Illyrians, who now began to spread their rule, were just besieging Corcyra, which before the Peloponnesian war was a paradise guarded by a fleet of several hundred galleys, but owing to incessant wars, was now all but a desert. The island was obliged to surrender before the Romans arrived. These however landed from Brundusium before Dyrrhachium near Apollonia, and rescued it, as they also did Epidamnus and Dyrrhachium. The neighbouring tribes submitted ; and the governor of Corcyra, Demetrius Pharius, a scoundrel, who in all likelihood was bribed, gave up to them the island. Issa also the Romans delivered, and they advanced through Upper Albania along the Dal- matian coast. They met with no resistance of any con- sequence : only one strong place held out, all the rest surrendered ; so that the queen was obliged to come to terms and make peace. The Illyrians now renounced their dominion over part of the Dalmatian isles and 48 TREATY WITH THE ILLYRIANS. over Upper Albania ; and they bound themselves not to sail to the south beyond the Drin, a river which flows from the lake of Scutari, and with no more than two unarmed vessels. This was an immense benefit for the Greeks. What was the fate of the tribes between Epi- rus and Scutari, cannot be told with certainty; but most likely, they, as well as Epidamnus and Apollonia, remained absolutely dependent on the Rouians, although these had no garrison and no prastor there. The latter may perhaps have levied a moderate tribute from them. As benefactors of the Greeks, and attracted by the irresistible charm which the praises of that people had for so many nations, the Romans sent ambassadors to Greece, to make known there the conditions of the treaty with the Illyrians. At that time, the -tp>is r>!> 'fufjt.a.lut a-a/urs/aj). In this assignation of the ager publicus, the point in dispute was no longer whether the plebeians were to have any share in it. On the contrary, the leading men of both orders had divided the possession between them, and had thus enriched themselves ; and now the population which had since grown up, laid claim to its assignation, so as to establish a new and free peasantry in the room of those who had died off, or had been bought up, and to give fresh life to what was left of the old yeomanry, which had thus dwindled away. It is, however, quite a different question, whether an extensive settlement in those parts was prudent at such a time, when a war with the neighbouring Gauls was to be dreaded. Yet after all, this war must one day or other have broken out. The Gauls could not long dwell quietly in Lombardy, and it was all one, whether it came on a little sooner. Certain it is, that this settle- ment alarmed the Boians in what are now the districts of Modena and Bologna, probably also in that of Parma : the population in fact had recovered from its losses, and was thirsting for revenge. They were also afraid that the great men at Rome, who had lost their large estate* in the Romagna, might seek for new ones in their owu country. The Romans, however, did not yet think of war with the Gauls : they had cast their eyes on Spain, and they had no hope of being able to drive the Gauls out of Lombardy. It is said that at that time the Ro- mans carried on wars against the Ligurians ; but we should be sadly mistaken if we fancied that they had already invaded Liguria proper, the territory of Genoa, It was, on the contrary, the Ligurians who had spread in the Apennines as far as Casentino and Arezzo, after the might of the Etruscans and Gauls had been broken at the Vadimo ; and it could have been none other than, these. It was a hard struggle. The Ligurians defended 52 WAR WITH THE CISALPINE GAULS. every single mountain, and each of the small tribes was only mastered after having been almost entirely crushed. Of the Gauls, there were in the north of Italy the Boians and Insubrians ; the former, south of the Po in the Romagna; the latter, in the territory of Milan, and in the plain between Bergamo and Brescia; yet these two cantons were not Gallic, but probably Rhae- tian, of Etruscan extraction. Between the Insubrians and Venetians dwelt the Cenomanians, between Milan and Mantua; these had placed themselves under the protection of the Romans. On the other side of the Alps, there was a great movement, and the Boians could now induce Transalpine volunteers to come over : these negociations caused the Romans great alarm. Several years now passed away : at length, eight years after the Flaminian law, a countless horde made its appearance, and the war broke out in 527. This war is memorable in history for the immense preparations of the Romans ; it was a swarm which they had to deal with, very much as in the time of the Cimbrians. Among the tribes which were in arms, there were also Tauriscans. These, on other occasions, we meet with only in Carniola: whether in those days they were also in Helvetia, we must leave undecided. The Romans called forth a gen- eral levy throughout all Italy : the allies obeyed very readily, as they looked forward with dismay to an in- vasion of the Gauls. The Romans opposed to the enemy an army on the common road of the Gauls near Rimini, which was under the consul L. 2Emilius, and another, a praetorian one, in Etruria. At the same time, the consul C. Atilius had gone with a fleet and army to Sardinia, as the Sards had revolted. In the neighbour- hood of Rome, there was a reserve : all the Italian na- tions were in marching order. Polybius here gives a list, from which we find that he had not a clear insight into the subject. The numbers are wrongly written, and all attempts to sum them up are fruitless : several WAR WITH THE CISALPINE GAULS. 53 peoples are not named at all. I believe that Fabius wrote in a hurry, when he stated the numbers at 800,000 foot and 80,000 horse. In short, this list is of no use ; and at any rate, one ought never to draw from this census such conclusions with regard to the population of the ancient world, as was done in the dispute between Hume and Wallace ; for although Hume keeps on the side of common sense, yet he takes the matter too lightly. Perhaps something has slipped out in Polybius. The Romans evidently looked forward to this war with far greater fear than they did to that of Hanni- bal. Such is human nature ! The Apennines north of Tuscany were then quite impassable, and there were only two ways there by which Italy could be invaded • the one was by Faesulse, and the other through the ter- ritory of Lucca, down by Pisa, where the whole valley at that time was a great marsh. By one of these two roads the Gauls must have passed, probably by the lat- ter ; but whilst Hannibal's march through these swamps has become famous, history is silent with regard to that of the Gauls. They left the Roman consul in his posi- tion near Ariminum, and fifty thousand of them burst into Etruria. Probably the army of the Romans was stationed near Florence, so as to block up the road to Rome ; and thus one can understand that they were late in knowing of the invasion of the Gauls, and of their march as far as Clusium. Thither the Gauls had arriv- ed, within three days' march from Rome. The Romans now broke up, that they might either cut off from them the way to Rome, or at least follow after them : the Gauls were apprised of this, and retreated. They marched from Clusium through the Siennese territory to the sea: here we find them in the neighbourhood of Piombino, over-against Elba. Polybius says that they now fell in with the Romans near a place called *« Fabius Cunctator dictator. The flower of the Roman troops were destroyed, and Fabius had to bring together a new army: this was now a medley of all sorts of people ; even the prisoners were already taken as volunteers. With such troops he THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. 95 was to make head against Hannibal, whose power could not but increase with his success ; whilst, on the other hand, the Romans had the consciousness of having been beaten, and dared not risk an engagement, although Hannibal, like all great generals, was not willing to give battle when there was no necessity for it. Fabius per- ceived that he had to train his troops, and that it was very fortunate for him that the allies remained faithful : this he was to turn to advantage. He also hoped that the consequences which might be expected from such a mot- ley composition of Hannibal's army would show them- selves ; and yet this was not the case. That army was indeed swept together from all nations, — Gauls espe- cially there were in it, though these were so exasperated against the Romans, that he might safely rely upon them, — but his choice troops consisted of Africans, and in a lesser- proportion, of Spaniards, which last were most likely the best of all. ' Moreover, he had many slingers ; his infantry did not yet on the whole amount to more than forty thousand men ; and with this army, he was in a country in which not one town had hitherto opened to him its gates of its own free will. The coun- try especially which he had last marched through, was firmly attached. to the Romans; in Apulia, perhaps, the feeling was already different. Hannibal, however, started in autumn, and marched along the Adriatic through the Abruzzi, the country of the Marrucinians and Pelignians. Here Fabius with- stood him, and tried to cut off his supplies, in which he also partly succeeded. But Hannibal, when hard press- ed, eluded his vigilance, and quietly breaking up his camp, appeared all at once in Campania. It was his design to make himself master of Casinum and the La- tin road, and by confining the communication between Rome and Campania to the Appian road alone, to try and see whether the Italians would declare for him. Here we may see an example of the disadvantage of the want of maps, although on the whole it is wonderful 96 TIIE SECOND PUNIC WAR. how wall they managed in ancient times without them. Hannibal meant to give the order to lead the army to Casinum ; but the guide, either misunderstanding him, or from downright dishonesty, led him through Upper Samnium, along the banks of the Vulturnus, down to Casilinum ; and here Hannibal perceived that he was in quite a different neighbourhood from where he had wished to be. In the meanwhile, Fabius had been be- forehand with him, and had left the Latin road, and strongly posted himself in Samnium. Hannibal, after having visited the country of the Falernians and Cam- pania with devastation, and made an immense booty, owing to which the men of rank at Rome were already sufferers, now wanted to begin his retreat through Sam- nium to Apulia, a very mild, sunny district, where he meant to take up his winter-quarters, and to establish a communication with Tarentum and other towns of lower Italy, and also with the king of Macedon. Here Fabius cut off his retreat near Mount Callicula, block- ing up with his troops the Caudine road, while another body of Romans beset the passes of Casinum, which led to Rome. Then Hannibal availed himself of his famous stratagem : he had encamped near the mountains which Fabius occupied. Livy's account of this stratagem makes out rather a silly story for the Romans. He says that Hannibal tied faggots to the horns of oxen, and setting these on fire, had them driven up into the moun- tains between the Roman posts ; and that on this, the Romans, believing them to be spectres, had betaken themselves to flight. But the real truth is what Poly- bius tells. Nothing was more common among the an- cients than to march by torch light. Now, when the Romans saw lights between their stations in the space which was left unoccupied, they thought that the Cartha- ginians were breaking through ; and they quickly made for what they supposed to be the endangered spot, that theymight stop their further progress. In the meanwhile, the rest of the Carthaginians had advanced close to the THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. 97 defiles, and had stormed the abandoned posts ; and thus the whole of the army got off without any loss : the Ro- man camp was burnt. Hannibal encamped on the borders between Apulia and the country of the Frentanians. Fabius followed him ; and here the Master of the Horse, Minucius, in Fabius' absence, and contrary to his orders, engaged in a successful battle with Hannibal. Tins raised the pride of the Romans so much, that they took it into their heads, that all their former mishaps had only befallen them by chance, and that now they were able to make up for it all ; and Minucius got an equal command with Fabius. Hannibal enticed him out, and gave him such a defeat, that he would have been anni- hilated, had not Fabius and a faithful band of Samnites come up at the very nick of time. Fabius brought the campaign to an honourable conclusion, as he did not lose anything against Hannibal, and not to lose any- thing, was a great deal indeed. Minucius resigned his power. Hannibal passed the winter in a state of actual distress : he was badly off for provisions, and as yet, not a single people had declared for him. In the year 536, L. JEmilius Paullus and C. Terentius Varro were consuls. For the first, and perhaps, the only time in Roman history, symptoms now manifest them- selves, like those to which we are so well accustomed in the times of Cleon and Hyperbolus, namely, that we meet with tradesmen holding the first offices of the state. C. Terentius Varro is said to have been the son of a butcher, which is so much at variance with everything before and after, that we can hardly believe it. Yet if this were so, the notion of plebeity must already have been quite changed, and such trades were carried on, not only by foreigners, Metics, and freedmen, but also by born citizens. Terentius Varro is made out to have been a demagogue who had a decided influence with the people, and used it in a spirit the very fellow to that of Cleon at Athens. But if we look to facts, we might entertain some doubts with regard to the seu- ir. a 98 THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. tence of condemnation, which our historians pronounce against him. If the overthrow at Cannae had really been owing to his fault, and his fault alone, how would the senate — although, ominis causa, he was no more chosen consul — have over and over again, during a long series of years, entrusted him with an army, and after the battle have gone out to meet him, and to thank him for not having despaired? This shows that the judgment formed of Varro, as handed down to us, can- not be relied on ; and that the pride of the great men was arrayed against him, as it was in former times against On. Flavius. That the learned M. Terentius Varro was his descendant, seems to be beyond a doubt : the latter, who lived not a hundred and fifty years later, belonged to the aristocratical party, — so much, and so quickly will the state of things change. L. JSmilius Paullus was fwe&Hftte, very likely from just causes ; he had, after his Illyrian campaign, been wrongfully accused, and had a narrow escape from being condemned. It was the rule that each consul had to command a consular army of two legions, each of four thousand two hundred foot and two hundred horse, with a corre- sponding number of allies : the latter furnished five thou- sand men and six hundred horse. If this force was to be strengthened, four legions and a proportionate num- ber of allies took the field, in all, 16,800 Romans, 20,000 allies, and 3,200 horse ; if one wanted to increase it still more, then, instead of four thousand two hundred Ro- mans, there were five thousand levied for each legion, and three hundred horse instead of two hundred. The Romans now raised such an army of eight legions ; and besides the consuls of the year, those of the year before were also placed at its head as proconsuls. This army collected in Apulia. Q. Fabius most earnestly recom- mended that his plan should be faithfully kept to, and such was likewise the conviction of the consul L. JSmi- lius Paullus; but the feeling at Rome was quite dif- ferent. THE SECOND PUNIC WAB. 99 The description of the battle of Cannae in Appian, is taken from Fabius Pictor ; the very same is likewise to be found in Zonaras. According to this version, Teren- tius Varro was far from being so blameable as Livy, and also Polybius make out. In fact, it is said that at the departure of the consuls from Rome, the whole people had raised an outcry against the sluggishness of Fabius, and had demanded a battle, because the long war press- ed heavily upon them. This story is likely in itself, and it accounts for Paullus having yielded against his own conviction. The two consuls joined each other in Apulia, and embarrassed Hannibal by their superior numbers: he took up his position near Cannae. This town had been destroyed by the earthquake ; but the arx was yet standing, and he took it by treachery. The statement in Gellius* that the battle was fought on the second of August, is hard to understand : if it be cor- rect, the two armies must have faced each other for months. But it would seem from Polybius' account, that the season was not yet so far advanced ; though this is by no means clear : the harvest there is at the end of May, and it must at all events have been already over. Both armies were encamped on the banks of the Aufi- dus, in the midst of the plains of Apulia, where the soil throughout is calcareous, as in Champagne, and there are therefore but few springs in it ; so that they were obliged to keep near the river. Hannibal is said to have been so hard put to it for provisions, that, if the battle had been at all delayed, he must needs have decamped. Yet he enticed the Bx>mans into fighting; for in a petty skirmish, whilst foraging, they got the best of it, as he did not come to the support of his men, but feigned to be afraid. The Romans still had a camp on either side of the river ; their base was Canusium, their, magazines at Cannae : Hannibal took these before their eyes, they being not yet strong enough to hinder it. * V, 17. from Q. Claudius (Quadrigarhis, Annalium 1. V.) and Macrob. Saturn. 1, 16.— Germ. Edit. 100 THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. Even later than this, Paullus was very loth to give battle, and it would also have perhaps been best to wait quietly : the longer Hannibal kept himself inactive, the more favourable matters became for the Romans ; if once the day was lost, all would be lost. Yet, on the other hand, much might be said in behalf of the expediency of a battle. If the Romans could not gain the victory with such superior numbers, they gave the allies, who, as it was, were already troublesome, the opportunity of falling off; and if, in their rear, the Samnites, or Capua proved faithless, their situation would have been desperate. The Romans therefore passed the river. The first who has given a satisfactory and clear de- scription of the ground of the battle of Cannae, was the traveller Swinburne. From his account, the battle may easily be made out. The Aufidus near Cannae makes a bend within which the two armies took their position: the Romans stood on the chord of the arc which is formed by the river ; Hannibal likewise passed over, and rested his two flanks on the curve of the river, so that the numerical superiority of the Romans was of no avail. a. Place where the Komans crossed. 6. Place where the Carthaginians crossed. c. Line of battle of the Carthaginians. d. Line of battle of the Romans. The Romans therefore had the land behind them , Hannibal placed himself in such a dangerous position, because anyhow he was lost, if he did not win this bat- tle. The Romans had 80,000 foot, and from 6 to 8,000 horse; among the latter, about 2,500 were Romans. THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. 101 The Carthaginians had 40,000 foot, and also about 8,000 horse, most of which, however, were Numidians ; these were excellent for foraging, reconnoitering, and harass- ing the enemy, but by no means fitted to stand the shock of a battle, and of no use at all against heavy cavalry: if they were worth anything, it was against light infantry. The Romans left ten thousand men be- hind in the camp, and thus advanced against the enemy with only 70,000, from whom we are besides to deduct a large number for those who at all times, and especially in a summer campaign, are either sick, or remain be- hind from other causes. On their right wing, they had the Roman cavalry ; on the left, was that of the allies. Hannibal had no elephants in this battle : he placed his best cavalry on his left wing, over-against the right one of the Romans ; on his own right, he had the Nu- midians. Besides these, there were on the left wing the Libyans, and on the right, the Celts and Spaniards , but part of the Libyans and Celts were also in the cen- tre. The Romans had not room enough for the whole of their army ; so that they were drawn up unusually deep, many maniples being one behind the other, which in their system of warfare was of no advantage. The battle was opened by the cavalry on the left wing of the Carthaginians making an attack upon the Roman horse, who, although they fought with great bravery, were soon routed, as the whole battle lasted only a short time : it began two hours after sunrise, and was ended two hours before sunset. In the meanwhile, the Numi- dians on the right wing were engaged with the cavalry of the allies. Hannibal now divided his line in the middle, and ordered one half to advance with the right, and the other with the left shoulders forward ; so that they advanced in the form of a wedge against the Ro- man centre. This was an employment of what is called the oblique line of battle, which in the seven years' war was so fatal at Collin, wherein one of the two extreme points stands still, while the rest of the line 102 THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. moves forward : he did this here with two lines. The Romans advanced to meet them, and the fight was very bloody. The Carthaginian troops could not break through, so they retreated by the wings; and these, when the Romans were pressing on, wheeled half round and attacked them in the flanks. At the same time, the cavalry of the Carthaginian left wing had gone round that of the Romans, and having been joined by the Numidians, it had routed the cavalry on the Roman left : it could now freely fall upon the Roman infantry ifrom the rear. JSmilius Paullus was mortally wounded, and in the dreadful confusion there was no longer any command; so that two hours before sunset the whole army was annihilated. The loss is not stated with precision. Polybius, contrary to his custom, gives the largest numbers : according to him, out of 80,000 men, 50,000 were killed, and 30,000 taken prisoners : but in this instance, we must deem Livy's statement to be the more correct one. Not to speak of those who were saved by having remained behind in the fortified camp, there also escaped at least ten thousand men from the field of battle ; the Romans consequently lost about forty thousand men. In Zonaras and Appian, we meet with the following story, borrowed in all likelihood from Fabius, which is characteristic, as it shows how the Ro- mans tried to throw a vail over their disasters. It is said that in Apulia a breeze rises every afternoon from .the east, that is to say, from the sea, which lifts up clouds of dust from the chalky soil ; and that Hannibal •on this had not only placed himself in such a position that the Romans had the dust blown into their faces, but also on the day before had caused the ground to be ploughed, so as to increase these clouds. That he took advantage of the wind, we may believe ; the rest sounds somewhat unlikely. There is another idle tale of his hav- ing allowed Spaniards, with daggers hidden about them, to go over as deserters to the enemy, and that these, being stationed by the Romans in the rear of their army, THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. 103 had afterwards suddenly fallen upon them. This is quite a childish and pitiful fable. The day after the battle, the Romans iu the camp surrendered, on condi- tion that if the Roman people would ransom them, they should regain their liberty. Varro escaped with seventy men to Canusium, whither all those now collected, who had got away safe ; and with these he betook himself to Venusia. Here Hannibal again shows how much he disliked sieges ; for he let Canusium alone with its Ro man garrison, and hastened to Capua, with which he had already before entered into negotiations. Cato has told us that Maharbal, the commander of the Carthaginian cavalry, called upon Hannibal to follow him, saying that on the fifth day he would hold a feast as conqueror on the Capitol. Hannibal smiled, and said that it was a fine idea, but that it could not be carried out. Then Maharbal had answered, " Thou art able then to gain a victory, but not to make use of it !" — There is no saying indeed what impression it would have made in Rome, if, instead of any tidings from the field of battle, the Carthaginian cavalry had been seen on the Latin road. But even cavalry could hardly have done it : the distance in a straight line is from fifty to sixty German miles ; so that they must have had relays of horses: for infantry, the thing was quite impossible. Against cavalry, the gates might have been shut. Nor would the Romans have felt so utterly defenceless as they did after the battle at the Alia. There were re- cruits in Rome, who were drilled, and in training for the naval service ; nothing would have been achieved, and the Carthaginians would in the most pestilential time of the year have been lying before the walls of Rome. To burn the country round the city, would not have been of any use to Hannibal ; whilst, on the other hand, it could not but have made the worst impression upon the Italians, had he returned with the cavalry without having done anything. How soon Hannibal arrived at Capua, is more than. 104 THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. we can tell, as, generally speaking, in such matters we have no precise dates given us by the ancients ; yet in the same year he was master of Capua, much earlier than it would seem from Livy's account. This town enjoyed isopolity with the Romans, and was under its own government ; its nobility held itself equal to that of Rome, and was connected by marriage with the very highest Roman families, even with the Claudii. During its long alliance with the Romans, it had gotten great wealth and many demesnes, and it was therefore in a very prosperous condition. But owing to their riches and their luxury, its citizens had become utterly effemi- nate ; so that they formed the strongest contrast to the moral and political energy of Rome. If such a town had dreamed of acquiring the leading rule over Italy after the downfall of that city, it was an inconceivable delusion. Were the nations indeed to shake off the yoke of Rome, only that they might put themselves under that of Capua! But the Campanians flattered themselves with the hope of getting this hegemony with the help of Hannibal, who fostered their day-dreams, but without promising them anything far certain. They therefore separated from Rome, formed a league with Hannibal, and received him into their city, which he forthwith made his arsenal. The terms of their alliance, taken literally, were very favourable. They were grant- ed perfect independence ; and it was stipulated that no single Campanian should be charged with any burden whatever; that they should not have to furnish any soldiers ; and that, in short,, they should be free from everything which had been irksome to the Tarentines in their alliance with Pyrrhus. The Romans had no garrison at Capua ; but three hundred horsemen from that town served in Sicily, and as hostages for these, Hannibal gave them as many Roman prisoners. They seem to have been exchanged : Rome, at that time, was by no means so haughty. The description in Livy of 'the way in which Hannibal established himself in the THE SECOND PUNIC "WAR. 105 town, of the banquet and the attempt to murder Han- nibal, is wonderfully beautiful, but certainly a romance. The story of Decius Magus, the only man in Capua who raised his voice for remaining true to the Romans, may alone have some foundation, however much it be em- bellished : there is no reason for us to doubt, that Han- nibal banished him as a friend of the Romans. On the part of Capua, it was indeed a foul ingratitude to fall off from Rome, and therefore the frightful vengeance of the Romans is very much to be excused. The Cam- panians had derived from their alliance with Rome nothing but benefit ; and now they did not only show themselves ungrateful, but they also committed an act of useless barbarity. They put the Romans who were ^" staying with them, to death in overheated bath rooms. * Nothing is more sickening than the arrogance of the unworthy, when they array themselves against worth. Whether it be true that the winter-quarters in luxu- rious Capua made the troops of Hannibal effeminate and dissolute, or whether this be a mere rhetorical flourish, cannot now be decided any longer ; but it is evident that the Romans made a better use of the win- ter. When after long and extraordinary exertions, men come into an easy life, they often fall into a state of las- situde; they are then very apt to lose the proper tone of mind, and the power of finding their way back to their former condition, and it returns no more. This is a rock on which many great characters have split. What, however, has not been taken into account, is that Hannibal was not able to recruit his army from Spa- niards and Libyans. Every one of his battles cost him many men; little skirmishes, and diseases in foreign climate, swept away a great number ; and he was only able to make up his losses from the Italians, which we know with certainty as for the Bruttians. This circum- stance is quite enough to account for the demoralised state of his troops. The Prussian army of 1762 was much inferior to that of 1757, and likewise the French 106 THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. one of 1812, which fought in the Russian campaign, was not so good as that of 1807. Another difficulty for him was that the Romans, after the battle of Cannae, had not let their courage droop : they would not even receive Carthalo, the Carthaginian ambassador. He found himself in the same plight as Napoleon was in Russia, after the battle of Borodino, when the peace was not accepted. It is true that part of southern Italy de- clared for him, and that he might have reinforced him- self from thence ; but all the Latin colonies throughout its whole extent remained faithful, and were not to be conquered. He was master of the country, but with a number of hostile fortresses in it. If he wanted to ad- vance by Campania, he was obliged to subdue the whole chain of fortified colonies, or to break through them, and reduce the Latin and Hernican towns in the neighbourhood of the city. These places were en- tirely in the interest of Rome, and indignant at the faithlessness of Capua. It was especially Gales, Fre- gellae, Interamnium, Casinum, Beneventum, Luceria, Venusia, Brundisium, Psestum, ^Esernia, and others, which paralysed the peoples there; these could not fairly gather their forces, because they had to fear the sallies of the Romans. They therefore in most instances blockaded those towns, and were no increase of strength to Hannibal. Thus his position was far from being an easy one. He reckoned upon support from Carthage and Spain ; the former he got, as Livy states in a few lines (probably from Ccelius Antipater), although in his view of the matter, it is always as if the Carthaginians had deemed the whole undertaking of Hannibal to be madness. According to Zonaras (from Dio Cassius), the reinforcement was considerable; but it only came in the following year, or even later : from Spain he received none at all. If dearth of money had exercised as deci- sive an influence among the ancients, as it does with us, the Romans indeed could no more have done any- thing. But they made every possible sacrifice; and THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. 107 thus it happened that by the battle of Cannae they only lost those districts which yielded themselves to the enemy, whilst they had no danger to fear with regard to the rest. The Marsians, Marrucinians, Sabines, Um- brians, Etruscans, Picentines, and others, remained faithful to them. In the list of the peoples which fell off after the battle of Cannae, as given by Livy and Polybius, no distinction is made between what took place at different times: the course of defection was but gradual, and there was no general rising, — so strong was the belief in the un- shaken might of Rome. Immediately after the battle, a part only of the Apulians, Samnites, and Lucanians, fell away ; so did afterwards the Bruttians, and at a much later period, the Sallentines; but none of the Greek towns as yet. It seems that the Ferentines, Hirpinians, and Caudines declared for Hannibal, whilst he was still on his march to Capua : Acerrae was taken after a long siege. Hannibal's object, while he was abiding in Cam- pania, was now to gain a seaport ; so that he might keep up a direct communication with Carthage. He found himself in the strangest position ; for though the general of a first-rate power, which was mistress of the seas, he did not possess one single harbour. An attempt against Cumae and Naples was repulsed. Near Nola, for the first time, the current of his victories was checked ; Marcellus threw himself into this important town, put down the party which wanted to go over to the Cartha- ginians, and drove Hannibal back ; which is described by the Romans as a victory, but was not so by any means, although it was now something great, even to have delayed the progress of Hannibal. Marcellus showed here considerable talent as a general, and once more inspired the Romans with confidence. The Bruttians, after having themselves fallen off, now succeeded in gaining over Locri, the first Greek town, which declared for Hannibal. Croton was taken by force of arms ; and this completed the ruin of that place, 103 THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. which, though once so great and prosperous, was still inhabited only about the centre, as Leyden is now, and still more so, Pisa ; so that the deserted walls could easily be stormed. Every attempt on the part of the inhabitants to defend the town was impossible ; for after the different devastations by Dionysius, Agathocles, and the Romans under Rufinus, in the war of Pyrrhus, their number had become very small. Thus Hannibal had now seaports ; and he received by Locri that reinforce- ment of troops and elephants from Carthage, which was the only one which he ever had from thence in a large mass : its amount is unknown to us. With the taking of Capua, ends the first period of the war of Hannibal, which here reaches its culminating point. From 537 to 541, five years elapse to the fall of Capua, which is the second period. The Romans make now already the most astonishing efforts. Their legions were continually increased. Allies we hear no more about : the bravest had most of them fallen away ; Etruscans, Umbrians, t/>.i?). We find that a /SoyXot had always, even under the kings, a share in the administration, as in all the republics governed by tyrants : that council was allowed to continue. The question now was, who were to be generals ? There were also the brothers-in- law of the king elected among them ; so that the revo- lution cannot have been a root and branch one. Nor indeed did they yet know after all whether they ought to uphold the league with the Carthaginians. The Roman praetor Appius Claudius negotiated with them, wishing to keep np the Roman alliance, and the Syracusan citi- zens felt great hesitation to break it ; but these two envoys of Hannibal managed to get themselves chosen 116 THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. generals, and they now did all they could to disturb the negotiation. The whole history of those events is ex- ceedingly perplexed. Livy has it from Polybius; his account therefore is authentic. After there had been several times an appearance of peace being concluded, the Carthaginian party brought about a revolution with the help of the mercenaries, by which the chief power was placed in the grasp of Hippocrates and Epicydes, and the whole family of Hiero was murdered on the threshold of the altar. After this horrible event, all was wild confusion: there was a republic indeed in name; but these two fellows ruled by means of the mercenaries; the unfortunate Syracusans were mere tools in their hands. Yet it must not be forgotten, that it was also the unjustifiable cruelty of the Romans which had irritated men's minds. The community of Enna, called together under a false pretext, was slaugh- tered for a sham insurrection; so that far and near, every one fell away to the Carthaginians. These now sent a considerable fleet under Himilco to Sicily, which was indeed quite right and welcome to Hannibal himself, for the purpose of maintaining the island, and dividing the Roman forces. The fleet, for some time, kept the communication open between Carthage and Syracuse ; but the generals showed themselves to be most wretchedly incompetent. Marcellus, who had gained glory by his contest against Viridomarus, and near Nola, now got the command of a Roman army in Sicily, and invested Syracuse. The town was quite easy to blockade on the land-side ; but the sea remained nearly always open. The war lasted for two years (538 -540). It is represented to us as the siege of Syracuse ; but it rather consisted in the Romans carrying on war from two very strong camps against the surrounding country. Himilco had made himself master of Agri- gentum, and from thence of a great part of the Sicilian cities. Only the western towns of Lilybseum and Pa- normus, and Messana and Catana in the north, remain- THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. 117 ed always with the Romans ; but the whole semicircle round Agrigentum, even beyond Heraclea, became sub- ject to the Carthaginians. The Carthaginians tried to relieve Syracuse, and they encamped in its neighbour- hood ; but the unwholesome air, which had prevailed there ever since the foundation of the city, and had more than once proved its salvation, destroyed the whole of their army, and the general himself, and Hip- pocrates, who had joined him, died. Marcellus made several attempts against Syracuse ; but when from the sea-side he attacked the Achradina, all his endeavours were baffled by the mechanical skill of Archimedes. As is well known, there are many accounts of this matter : the best authenticated confines itself to this, that Ar- chimedes foiled all the attempts of the Romans to sap the walls ; that he smashed the sheds which protected the assailants, and destroyed the battering engines on their ships by his superior machinery. It seems less true that he set fire to the Roman fleet with burning- glasses : the silence of Livy, and consequently of Poly- bius, from whom he borrowed his description, bears witness against it. Marcellus never could have taken the town, had he not by chance perceived that part of the wall, which adjoined the sea, was but badly fortified, and had he not heard at the same time from deserters that the citizens were quite heedlessly keeping a festi- val. This day he availed himself of to scale that weak place ; and thus the Romans became masters of two parts of the town, Tycha and Neapolis, and soon after- wards of the Epipolse, that is to say, the town on the heights: the greater portion was still to be taken, namely, the old town (N'iaoc), and the most flourishing part, namely, the Achradina ; for Tycha and Neapolis were only suburbs, which were not even connected with the city. The Syracusans now began to treat. They were much inclined to surrender, and Marcellus wished for nothing better ; but the Roman deserters, in their rage and despair, wanted to hold out to the last gasp, 1'18 THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. and they managed to mislead the mercenaries, and to inspire them with their own fury. Thus in a massacre the most eminent citizens were butchered, and these barbarians usurped the government ; so that there was now at Syracuse the same terrible state of things which we read of in Josephus of the besieged city of Jerusa- lem. If the Romans ever could have openly departed from their principles, and have allowed the deserters to go out free, Syracuse would not have been destroyed : but they would not deviate from them ostensibly, al- though they did so in other ways ; for they had recourse in this war to bribery and corruption of every kind, means which they had formerly scouted. Marcellus bribed Mericus, a Spanish general among the mercena- ries, to give up to him part of the Achradina ; and this treachery was planned with such fiendish cleverness that it was completely successful. The garrison of the N«a-oj was enticed out under the pretence of repelling the enemy, and the Nao-oj as well as Achradina were taken. Syracuse was at that time the most magnificent of all the Greek cities, Athens having long since lost its splen- dour. Timaeus, who had lived in the latter city, and must needs have had a distinct remembrance of it, ac- knowledged Syracuse as the first and greatest of all. The humanity of Marcellus after the conquest of the town, is by the ancients generally set forth as quite exemplary; but the 'ExAoy<*< Tigl yvapuv now show us what a sort of forbearance it was. The town was not burned, but completely sacked; and the inhabitants were driven out, and had to tear up the grass from the earth, to appease their hunger. The slaves were sold, a fate, which was so much envied by those who were free, that many gave themselves out to be slaves, and let themselves be sold, only to keep soul and body to- gether. All that was in the town, became the prize of the soldiers or of the state ; Marcellus carried away the highest works of Grecian art in a mass to Rome. Livy's remark is a true one, that this melancholy gain was THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. 119 avenged upon him, inasmuch as the temple of Virtus and Honor, which he thus bedecked, was already thoroughly stripped by others in his (Livy's) times. After the fall of Syracuse, the war in Sicily lasted yet two years, and it ended with the taking of Agrigentum, which was still more terribly dealt with, as the Romans sold all the freemen as slaves. Thus Agrigentum was thrice laid waste : — once under Dionysius ; then, a hun- dred and fifty years later, in the first Punic war ; and now once more, after another fifty years. It was the most splendid town in the island next to Syracuse, and it became at that time the insignificant place which it is still to this day. M. Valerius Laevinus, a Roman of humane disposition, afterwards gathered together a new community therein (549). This victory over the Cartha- ginian army was also brought about by treachery ; for a Numidian captain named Mutines went over with his soldiers to the Romans, and, like Mericus, was liberally rewarded by them. Thus, in the sixth year after the defection of Hieronymus, Sicily was again quite under the rule of the Romans. The taking of Syracuse is of the same date as that of Capua (541), and both of these events may show us, how little the wars of the ancients are to be deemed like those of our own days. Since the end of the seventeenth century especially, quite a different notion of waging war has come into vogue. The last war of horrors, was the devastation of the Palatinate under Louis XIV. The period from 541 to 545 is enlivened by a number of battles, in which Hannibal almost always had the best of it. From the tenth year of the struggle, he was in possession of the greatest part of Apulia, Samnium, and Lucania, and of the whole of Bruttium : here was the seat of the war in the tenth, eleventh and twelfth years. He defeated the proconsul Cn. Fulvius near Herdonia with considerable slaughter ; from an ambush, he surprised the consuls, M. Claudius Marcellus, and T. Quinctiua Crispinus : both of them died ; the first, iu 120 THE SECOND PUNIC WAK. the fight ; the second afterwards, of his wounds. He took Arpi and Salapia (likewise an Apulian town) ; but the Romans recovered them again. Tarentum he gained after a three years' siege, in which he displayed all the superiority of his genius. Every one of the Greek towns of Lower Italy had now gone over to him. Ta- rentum, which had fallen into his hands owing to the treachery of the inhabitants, was afterwards again be- trayed to the Romans by the commander of the Brut- tian garrison. The city was treated like one which had been taken by the sword : all its treasures were carried to Rome, and thenceforward Tarentum appears desolate, until C. Gracchus sent a colony thither. The Romans might have expected from the very be- ginning, that the Carthaginians, after the great suc- cesses of Hannibal, would send from Spain army upon army. It was not therefore on account of their small settlements there, but to prevent these from sending out new troops, that with incredible exertions they dis- patched an army to Spain under the command of P. and On. Scipio (in the second year of the war, 535). These at first established themselves in Tarragona, and from thence they harassed the Carthaginians. After the battle of Cannae already, it was intended that Has- drubal, Hannibal's brother, should set out for Italy with an army to support him ; but the Scipios hindered this, and although in the beginning the rule of Carthage had been really popular, the fickleness of the Spaniards led them to join the Romans, when they saw that they were only used by the Carthaginians as tools to furnish num- bers of men and supplies of money for the war. How these wars were conducted, is not to be clearly made out from Livy's narration. It is surprising, but there seems to be no doubt of it, that the Romans advanced as far as Cordova ; (for Illiturgis is surely the place of that name near Cordova, and not the other). This war is not worth a detailed description, as from the great distance of the scene of operations, according to Livy's THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. 121 own opinion, who is here our only authority, all the ac- counts of it are anything but trustworthy.* We cannot even say for certain how long the two Scipios (duo fvl- mina belli in Lucretius and others) carried it on. Livy mentions the eighth year; but if this were reckoned from the arrival of the Scipios in Spain, it would not tally with the one in which he places their death. But I am very much inclined to believe that they were not killed before 542 : otherwise there is a gap, and the date of Hasdrubal's departure from Spain is too early. The Carthaginians had increased the number of their troops, and had raised a considerable host, which was to march under Hasdrubal to Italy. They had divided it into three bodies, which by skilful movements sepa- rated the armies of the two Scipios, and won two bat- tles against them. In the first of these, P. Scipio was slain, owing to the faithlessness of the Oeltiberians, a plain proof of the barbarous condition of that people. Faithlessness is a leading feature in the character of barbarians : good-faith is not the growth of the savage state, but of a higher civilization ; the savage follows the impulse of his passions. The ancient Gtoths, and still more so the Vandals, were just as faithless as the Alba- nians of the present day. Thirty days after his brother, Cn. Scipio also fell: the Romans lost all the country beyond the Ebro, and their rule in Spain was almost wholly destroyed. Yet, if we trust the accounts which Livy repeats without quite believing in them, they soon retrieved all their losses ; a Roman knight, L. Marcius, gathered together all that had been left of his country- men, and with these, in his turn, he utterly routed the Carthaginians. The senator Acilius, who described this victory in Greek, has said that the Carthaginians lost by it thirty-eight thousand men, and the whole of their camp ; but Livy himself seems rather to agree with Piso, that Marcius had only collected what remained of the • In the same manner there exist three different accounts of the death of Marcellus. 122 THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. Romans, and beaten off the attacks of the Carthaginians upon their entrenchments. The difficulty at Rome was now what to do, as the army was nearly destroyed, all but the remnant at Taraco. A reinforcement was sent out under C. Claudius Nero ; but he did not succeed in doing anything beyond occupying a somewhat larger Bpace along the sea coast on this side of the Ebro, and hindering the march of Hasdrubal. It was determined therefore, as both the consuls were engaged in Italy, that the people should elect a general with proconsular power to go to Spain. Comitia centuriata were held, as at the election of a consul ; but no one offered himself as a candidate. On this, P. Scipio, the son of the Pub- lius Scipio who had lately fallen, a young man in his twenty-fourth year, stepped forth, and proposed him- self for that dignity. To him the Roman people had, even at an early period, directed its attention. He is said to have saved his father from a deadly stroke at the battle on the Ticinus already; and after the rout at Cannae, to have compelled the young Roman nobles who in their despair would have left the city to its fate, and have emigrated to Macedon, to take an oath on his sword not to go away. But if he was really not more than twenty-four years old when he went to Spain, he could hardly have saved his father at the Ticinus. As no one else applied for it, the place was given to him in spite of the opposition, made by many on the ground of his being still so young, and ex domo fwiestata, in which even the year of mourning was not yet over. Scipio was called among his contemporaries the Great, a surname which has unjustly fallen into disuse ; for no man in the Roman history ought to be set above him. His personal qualities everywhere turned the scales. He was not only a great general, but also a well educated man ; he possessed Greek learning, and under- stood the Greek language, so that he composed his me- moirs in it. It was the opinion of the people that there was some mysterious influence upon him, and he fos- THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. 123 tered it by his own belief that he was leagued with the powers above. If he gave advice in the assembly or in the army, he always gave it as if it had been inspired by the gods, and all his counsels succeeded. He also went every morning to the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, and would stay there for a while by himself. At one time, he gave out that he had heard a voice which prophesied victory to him ; at another, he told his soldiers that in three days he would take the ene- my's camp with its rich stores ; and it turned out as he had said. This wonderfully strengthened the confidence which the soldiers had in him. We must therefore either deem him to have been an inspired enthusiast, or a crafty impostor, just like Mohammed. The latter hypothesis is not to be thought of. It is a great ques- tion to this day, whether Cromwell until his last years was an honest fanatic or an impostor. There is in such characters a remarkable mixture, which is scarcely to be distinguished. Scipio was at that time highly popular in Rome, even in the senate, and he was furnished with all the means for carrying on the war. The first period which he passed in Spain, was taken up by preparations at Tar- ragona; it very likely lasted longer than what Livy states. The latter himself tells us that some writers dated the taking of Carthago Nova later than he did ; and this is probably correct, as it surely is to be placed one year later, in 546 ; for otherwise the conduct of the Carthaginians would be unaccountable, nor could it be Understood how Scipio could have marched from Tar- ragona to Carthagena in spite of three hostile armies. Very likely the writers thought that it had been inglorious for Scipio to have rested for so long a time. Hasdrubal had gained over the Celtiberians as free allies, and had raised among them an army which he was to lead to Italy. Besides Hasdrubal, Hannibal's brother, there were also Hasdrubal, Gisgo's son, and Mago, another 124 THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. brother of Hannibal, in Spain. Bat Scipio led his array to New Carthage, without the Carthaginians having expected it. With regard to the details of this cam- paign, and the time which it lasted, it is impossible to arrive at any positive result. New Carthage, for a city, was but small, as indeed most of the towns in southern France, Italy, and even in Spain, were smaller in the days of old than they are now. It was scarcely more than a military station ; but during the short time since ithad been founded, it had already become' of great con- sequence : it was well peopled with a numerous Punic community ; it was an important place of arms ; there were arsenals and dockyards in it ; and it was strong- ly fortified with high and new built walls. To take this place, was one of those all but impracticable under- takings, which are only possible from their being quite unlooked for. The town lay on a peninsula. Scipio who must have had intelligence of its weakness, first made an attack on the wall which was on the peninsula ; but his men were repulsed with great loss. That part of the bay which washes the north side of the town, is a shallow pool, and does not belong to the harbour; there is still a tide there, though not so strong a one as on the open sea, and it may be forded at low water, as a firm bed of gravel runs along the wall : these shallows Scipio had caused to be examined by fishing boats. He renewed the attack from the land side, and whilst the ebb was at its lowest, he had soldiers brought to the shore, who scaled the low wall by means of ladders, and made themselves masters of a gate ; and thus the town was taken by storm. This loss was a deathblow to the Carthaginians. Hasdrubal must at that time have al- ready been in the country near the Pyrenees, and he must have reckoned on the place being able to defend itself. How many troops Hasdrubal carried over to Italy, ig »ot exactly known to us, as we are left here without THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. 125 Polybius.* He did not march with a large army from Spain ; but, with the skill of his father and brother, he increased it in Gaul. Many a messenger, as Livy ex- pressly tells us, had in those days stolen across the Alps over to Hannibal in Apulia ; so that the Alpine tribes had already become acquainted with the Carthaginians. Moreover, by a twelve years' intercourse the people there were convinced, that the passage through their country was only a secondary object, and that therefore it was their interest to grant it under fair conditions. Hasdrubal avoided the blunder made by his brother in starting too late ; in the autumn his preparations were ended, and he now set out, going a great way round. It is evident, on a careful collation of the different state- ments, that after a short engagement with Scipio, he marched from the country of the Celtiberians, not through Catalonia, but through Biscay, by what is now Bayonne, along the north side of the Pyrenees ; so as to elude the Romans, and not be stopped by them. In the south of Gaul, he took up his winter-quarters some- where in modern Roussillon, and was able to start from thence by the first beginning of spring. We learn from Livy, that at that time the Arvernians had the princi- patus Gattice, and that they allowed him a free passage. He now reached Italy without any mischance, because he had started early enough, When it is said that he had gone over the ground which had taken Hannibal five months, in two, this applies only to his march from the Pyrenees to Placentia, whereas Hannibal had set out from New Carthage. The Romans heard with great dismay of Hasdrubal's departure, and they made immense exertions. Hanni- bal was well apprised of everything ; but he expected his brother later. There is no doubt but that in the course of the preceding years he had received more re- inforcements than Livy tells us ; yet his old troops were * According to Appian, they were 48,000 foot, *,000 horse, and 15 ele" 126 THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. indeed almost gone, and he had nothing but Italians, whom, however, he had completely under his control and command : he was therefore now obliged to carry on the war according to the Roman system. It was his endeavour, by continual marchings and counter-march- ings in Apulia, Lucania, and Bruttium, to move the Romans from one place to the other, like a clever chess- player ; and in this he was perfectly successful. Had Hasdrubal been like Hannibal, he would not have loi- tered. But he wished first to take Piacenza, which, wonderful to say, had held out until then in the midst of the Gallic tribes; for thus he would remove this thorn from the side of those Gauls, and at the same time gain a safe place of arms. In this he wasted a good deal of time in vain, which perhaps was one of the causes of his bad success. His messengers to Hannibal were intercepted, and his letters read. The Romans kept Hannibal hemmed in within three armies, none of which, however, had the courage to give battle: their main force they had sent against Gaul. Hasdrubal's plan was to march, not through Tuscany, but along the Adriatic to the frontier of Apulia, where Hannibal was station- ed. He was opposed by C. Claudius Nero as commander- in-chief; to Ariminum, M. Livius Salinator had been sent with the volones and two legions of allies, six le- gions altogether. But Livius fell back before Hasdru- bal as far as Sena Gallica, and would have retreated even to the Aternus in Picenum, had not Nero risked an expedition which is one of the boldest and most ro- mantic ever made, but which was nevertheless success- ful. Hannibal was certainly not informed of the ap- proach of his brother ; this is proved beyond dispute by his march to Larinum : yet as he was not in a condition to take the Roman camp by storm, Claudius picked out the flower of his troops, and went with these by forced marches to the aid of his colleague. Hasdrubal, who had got ready to attack Livius, perceived from a care- ful observation of the Romans as they were turning out, THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. 127 that the state of their horses, arras, and accoutrements, which was quite different from what had been seen in Livius' troops hitherto, betrayed their having made a long march ; from this he concluded that the latter had received reinforcements. In the night his attention was still more aroused : he heard the trumpets and bugles blow twice, from which he inferred that there were two consuls, although the Romans had in other respects taken every care to deceive him, and had not enlarged their camps. When Hasdrubal was sure of this, he wished to go a long way round, whereas until then he had evi- dently advanced by the straight road along the Adria- tic. He had crossed the Metaurus, but now be wished to recross the river ; and he marched higher up on its opposite bank, so as to approach the Apennines, and thus turn the Romans, or else to keep himself on the defensive behind the Metaurus. Here he had the mis- fortune of his guide deserting him ; and he went along the river, under the very eyes of the Romans, without being able to find the ford. It is not unlikely that heavy rains had lately fallen ; for otherwise the Metaurus may be forded anywhere. When he had been wearing him- self out during the greatest part of the day, and he was now wavering, now trying to cross over, the Romans fell upon him. The battle was set in array in a manner worthy of a son of Hamilcar and brother of Hannibal ; the Iberians and Libyans fought like lions : but the star of Rome decreed a requital for the day of Cannae, and almost all the army, though not the whole of it, as Livy says, together with the general himself, was de- stroyed. Those who escaped, only got off because the Romans were too tired to follow after them any farther. According to Appian (whose account is from Polybius or Fabius), part of the Celtiberians cut their way through, and reached Hannibal ; and in this there is an air of truth, as it does not redound to the glory of the Romans, and is not therefore likely to have been in- vented by them : the Gauls who were not slain, retired 128 THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. into their own land. Thus the whole undertaking ended in discomfiture. The Roman army now quickly return- ed, without Hannibal's having ventured in the mean- while to strike a blow. Claudius caused the head of the hero-warrior of the house of Barcas to be taken to the outposts of Hannibal, who in this way received the first tidings of his brother's overthrow. Here ends the third period of the war. After Hasdrubal had led his troops into Italy, there still remained in Spain the two armies of Hasdrubal Gisgo and of Mago, which had been driven back to the Atlantic. Against these, Scipio carried on the war the rest of that year, and in the following one ; but all the spirit of it had fled with the Barcine Hasdrubal. Mago tried only to keep Gades ; Hasdrubal after a series of battles went over to Africa. In Gades, a city which wanted to be equal with Carthage, and yet was subject to her, trea- chery was brewing ; they were engaged in a plan to give up Mago to the Romans. It was discovered and de- feated : the magistrates were enticed out, and put to death. Mago, however, now received orders to with- draw from the place. He was to go to the Balearic isles, which seem to have revolted against Carthage ; and from thence to Liguria, there to collect a force with which he was to support Hannibal in Italy, and also, at the same time, to raise troubles in Etruria. When the Spanish peoples saw that the Carthaginians had given them up, and that they were employing the last means in their power to squeeze out of them sup- plies for other wars, they refused to obey them any longer. To the inhabitants of Gades also, the severity which had been shown towards them, was only an addi- tional motive for an everlasting separation ; and they made an alliance with the Romans, to which some wri- ters give an earlier date than we can possibly assume from the very connected account of Livy. This is a political falsification of history ; the Gaditanians in fact pretended out of vanity to have concluded it imraedi- THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. 129 ately after Scipio's arrival in the country. Scipio was still remaining in Spain in 545 and 546 ; the Carthagi- nians were quite driven out of it. Yet the Romans had no firm footing in that country ; for they only offered to its people, who had reckoned upon having freedom, a rule which perhaps was still more oppressive than that of the Carthaginians, with whom they had an opportunity of getting pay, as these employed mercenaries, whilst the Romans only occa- sionally took small bodies of Celtiberian troops into their service. The Romans also now revenged themselves on some towns which had behaved with particular fury against them. There happened at this period some hor- rible events, the outbursts of a fanaticism of bravery which is turned into madness. Such was the defence of ^Llliturgis and of Astapa. From the latter of these, all who were able to bear arms sallied forth, and fought to the last man ; and at the same time, those who re- mained behind killed the women and children, and set fire to the town, laying hands on themselves also while it was burning. While Scipio was now putting the province in order, which was still limited to Catalonia, Valencia, and An- dalusia, an insurrection was planned among the Spa- niards. Few of the Spanish states were republics ; most of them were governed by princes, two of whom, Man- donius and Indibilis, after a long alliance with the Ro- mans, had imbibed a furious hatred against them. Here also that nationality of the Spaniards which one meets with in all ages, displays itself in the wrath which all at once breaks out against the foreigners, whom they had wished from the beginning only to use as tools. These events are also remarkable for another reason, being the first traces of a state of things which long afterwards showed itself in a more decided shape, the tendency of the Italian allies towards equality with the Romans. Yet our accounts of them are incomplete, and do not hit the main point. Scipio was very ill ; II. I 130 THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. and a report got abroad of his death, at a time when there was stationed near Sucro an army of eight thou- sand men, consisting of Italian allies, and not, as Livy says, of Romans. These resolved to make themselves masters of Spain, and to found an independent state. The first pretext of this insurrection was the arrears of their pay, which, although it was taken from their own treasuries, they received much more irregularly than the Romans : on the whole, they felt that they were ne- glected, and yet they well knew, that there was no do- ing without them. They chose two from among them- selves, an Umbrian, and a Latin from Gales, to be their generals, and even invested them with the consular in- signia, which Zonaras mentions, though Livy says no- thing about it: these took the command, and were entering into an understanding with the two Spanish princes. The crisis seemed most highly dangerous ; but when the tidings of Scipio's recovery reached the camp, they at once lost courage, and his personal char- acter had such influence, that they abandoned every idea of an insurrection, and thought of nothing but making their peace. Scipio came down to Carthagena ; he behaved as if he deemed them to be in the right, and intimated to them, that they might atone for their of- fence by serving against the Spanish princes ; and that they were to go to Carthagena to receive their pay, either singly, or in a body. They determined upon com- ing in a body, as this seemed to be the safer plan, and they believed that everything had been forgiven them. And their minds were set quite at ease, when on the day before their entry into Carthagena, they met with a quartermaster, who told them that the Roman army was to march to Catalonia : thus they arrived in the evening, and were quartered in the suburbs, the officers in the town itself. The latter were invited to the houses of the most respectable Romans, and arrested during the night. The next morning, the Roman army, on which he could implicitly rely, made a show of march THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. 131 ing out of the gates, and the mutineers were summoned to the forum, to get their pay : these had their suspi- cions completely lulled, and they came unarmed. But at the gates, the columns were ordered to halt ; they occupied all the streets, and hemmed in the mutineers. Scipio now addressed these last, and told them what punishment they had deserved ; yet he contented him- self with having only the ringleaders, thirty-five in num- ber, seized and put to death : the rest received their pay, and were let off. After this, the war against the Spaniards was easy. The two princes were pardoned on their oath to keep quiet. Before Scipio had yet left Spain, he achieved a feat of romantic daring in going over to Africa to visit Sy- phax, the king of the Massaesylians, who lived in eastern and part of western Algeria, and whose capital was Cirta : the geography of those countries at the time of the Carthaginian rule, is one of the most obscure. Sy- phax was not tributary to the Carthaginians, but in that sort of dependence in which the prince of a barbarous people must be upon a very powerful and civilized state : he served them for pay, and felt altogether subordinate ; sometimes he was quite at their disposition, at others, he fell away from them, after which, he would make peace again. Just then, he was at peace with them ; but he had previously, when at war, made overtures to the Romans, and on his demand for Roman officers to train his troops, Scipio had sent over envoys with full powers. This, however, led to no results ; for in the meanwhile peace had been concluded, and Syphax kept neutral. Scipio now ventured to cross over at his in- vitation, in the hope of forming an alliance with him, as he had, from the very first, entertained the just notion of attacking Carthage on her own ground. Here he actually met with Hasdrubal, son of Gisgo, at the same banquet. The object of the conduct of Syphax towards the Romans, was not to allow the Carthaginians to be- 132 THE SECOJTD PUNIC WAR. come too powerful, and to draw money out of them : that he let Scipio escape, is really to be wondered at. In Spain, all was now ended, and Scipio returned to Italy, where, however, he was not granted a triumph, because while conducting this war, he had not held any curule office : every other mark of honour was shown him. He was still proconsul ; before that, he had been sedile ; he had not yet been praetor ; nevertheless he now stood for the consulship, though he had not yet reached the age prescribed by law : the leges annales, by a very wise enactment, had been set aside for so long as the war should last. He was unanimously chosen by all the centuries ; the nation longed to see the end of the war, and every one expected it from him. As far as we can see, this was nothing but one of those silly notions, by which the public are so easily taken in ; the great men, it was said, were right glad that the war with Hanni- bal should drag on, as thus they could so much the oftener get for themselves the highest dignities. Scipio, who was the idol of the people, was withstood by the party of the grandees, of which Fabius is to be deemed the mainspring, — a party just like the one which Livy describes as having existed in Carthage against Hanni- bal. Yet one ought to be fair, even to that party. Old Fabius Maximus, perhaps already in his eightieth year, was at its head for more reasons than one ; perhaps, even because, like every old man who sees his own brightness fading away, he was inclined to look upon the rising young men with unfavourable eyes, Scipio also, from the very circumstance of his being no common man, may have seemed to the Romans a very incom- prehensible character ; many may have been afraid that his good-luck would make him reckless, as it did Regu- lus ; others, that it might tempt him to overthrow the constitution. That this suspicion was utterly gr6und- less, as far as it was founded upon Scipio's personal dis- position, may safely be asserted ; yet we find it men- THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. 133 tioned here and there,* that it was intended to make him consul or censor for life : had this been done, he would have been king, although, as things then were, this could not possibly have been brought about with- out bloodshed : yet it shows, that the mistrust, after all, was not without reason. Hence it was that a deter- mined opposition manifested itself in the senate, to whose department belonged grants of men and money. Scipio tried to get Africa for his province ; but they gave him Sicily, without allowing him any other troops but those which were there already : he, however, got leave to try bis chance in an expedition with those who might voluntarily offer themselves. This conduct of the senate towards Scipio is an acknowledged fact, and by it Rome was very nearly on the point of losing again all the advantages of the war. This behaviour of the senate ought to be borne in mind, when its stedfastness in the war with Hannibal is spoken of. The influence of Scipio's personal qualities was now seen. In Italy there was famine and disease, and yet part of the Etruscan and Umbrian states, which were not obliged to bear any burthens whatever, and there- fore, owing to the regard which the Romans then had for every sort of privilege, had remained in full vigour, whilst Rome had worn herself out, exerted themselves for Sci- pio, as much as if they had themselves to undertake a war. They built a fleet for him, and equipped it ; Arretium gave him arms for thirty thousand men, and likewise money and provisions; from the Sabines, Picentines, Marsians, and other neighbouring peoples, a great num- ber of veterans and young discharged soldiers volun- teered to serve under him. Thus he got a considerable fleet and a large army, quite against the wishes of the senate. He crossed over to Sicily, made from thence an attempt upon Locri, and took that town from Hanni- • Liv. XXXVIII, 5fi. Valer. Max. IV, I. 6. According to both pas. sages, he was, however, to be appointed consul and dictator for life. — Germ. Edit. 134 THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. bal ; yet, on the whole, the year of his consulship pass- ed off without any thing remarkable. Why he waited so long in Sicily, has not been fully accounted for ; it seems that he took matters easy, and willingly lingered in these Sicilian regions, being particularly delighted with Syracuse. Men's expectations were most signally dis- appointed : it had been believed, that as soon as his pre- parations were at all complete, he would pass over to Africa ; and now it was understood that he was living quite in the Greek style at Syracuse. Commissioners thereupon were sent to inquire into the matter, and if the charge were true, to depose him ; but he so over- awed them, that they reported that he was by no means wasting his time, but was finishing his preparations. Hannibal, after the battle of Sena, had already fore- seen the issue of the war ; but he did not yet lose cour- age. On the contrary, he deemed it his duty to struggle to the last moment, that the Romans might not be sure of their own country ; yet, as he could not defend such extensive provinces, he evacuated Apulia, Messapia, the country of the Hirpinians, and the greater part of Lu- cania, so that he only kept the south-eastern part of it, and Bruttium. Here he remained for three campaigns, with a perseverance which Livy himself admires ; like a lion, he made whoever dared to touch him, pay hea- vily for it. Within this narrow tract of country, he had to recruit and provision his army, and to detain the Romans, so as to keep them away from Africa, liv- ing the whole time in the midst of peoples whom he drove to despair by the most exorbitant demands. And he succeeded in all this, without a thought either of rebellion or of violence being awakened against him ; yet he was neither able to pay nor to feed his army, and he suffered from plague and hunger. His head- quarters and arsenal was Croton. Thus the war went on, until the Carthaginians called him to Africa, the Romans narrowing his district more and more by wrest- ing from him one place after the other. THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. 135 It was not till the year after his consulship, 548, when his proconsular imperium was prolonged, that Scipio with four hundred transports,protected by forty quinqueremes, crossed over to Africa. If the Carthaginians had had their ships of war assembled, they must have baffled Scipio's undertaking ; but this could hardly have been the case, or else their inactivity would have been quite unaccountable. How many troops he carried over, was unknown, even to the ancients themselves ; as an ave- rage number, we may assume sixteen thousand men foot, several thousand horse, and a considerable fleet : when these departed, there were great tremblings of heart in the timid party among the Romans, who thought of no- thing but the fate of Regulus. Scipio's arrangements were admirable. In three days he made the passage, and landed north of Carthage, not far from Utica, near a headland at the mouth of the river Bagradas, which, like almost all the rivers which fall into the Mediterra- nean, has formed another mouth farther on, its old one having been choked up with sand ; Shaw, however, in his travels, fixes the point with admirable precision. Its memory was kept up as long as the Roman empire lasted, by the name of Castra Cornelia; it was a head- land with an offing, a gradually sloping beach of gravel, on which the ships had to be drawn up. Here Scipio entrenched himself, and from thence made excursions. In the meanwhile, Syphax had been entirely gained over to the Carthaginians, having married Sophonis (in He- brew Zephaniah), or, as Livy has it, Sophonisbe, the daughter of Hasdrubal, the son of Gisgo. When Scipio had landed, a Carthaginian army under Hasdrubal, a great Numidian one under Syphax, and a smaller Numi- dian one under Masinissa, went out to meet him. Ma- sinissa was hereditary prince of the Massylians, a peo- ple on the frontier of what is now Tunis, which dwelt at the foot of the mountains. He was a vassal of the Car- thaginians, had served under their standards in Spain, and in that country already had entered into some cor- 136 THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. respondence with the Romans. He is known to have been the guest-friend of Scipio ; in the Somnium Scipi- onis, he makes his appearance as a venerable old man ; he was brought up in Carthage, and, at least in his later years, understood Greek or Latin. These African princes were all of them thoroughly faithless. That his truth to the Romans ever became so renowned, was merely owing to the fact that it was his object to en- rich himself at the expense of Carthage, in which he was aided by the Romans; but his son, who already stood in a different relation to them, in the third Punic war certainly did them a great deal of mischief. A romance has been got up, in which Masinissa is in love with Sophonisbe, and therefore jealous of Syphax ; with the latter, he is said to have been involved in a war, and afterwards reconciled. He now came, it would seem, as an ally of the Carthaginians against Scipio, who enticed him to go over. He had lost his hereditary right, owing to the Carthaginians having favoured a rival of his ; for some time, he had roved in the desert : he now wished to try his luck with the Romans, and he showed him- self useful to them as a centre, round which a host of Africans gathered. He imparted to Scipio his plan by which he had beguiled the Carthaginians, and Scipio fell upon them from an ambush : the loss was considerable for Carthage, as it comprised a number of her citizens. The Carthaginian general Hanno was taken prisoner, and afterwards exchanged for Masinissa's mother. In the meanwhile, Syphax had had the presumption to act as mediator between the Romans and Carthaginians ; which, of course, came to nothing, as everything was then to remain as before, and Hannibal and Scipio were each of them te withdraw from Italy and Africa. But the attempt was of use to Scipio ; for while this was going on, he was able to establish himself in Africa. Scipio besieged Utica with ill success ; Hasdrubal and Syphax kept him in check, very likely in open camps. On this, Scipio undertook a sudden night-attack, which THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. 137 shows what wretched discipline there was in their ar- mies. He managed to get in, and to set fire to both the camps, which were of straw-built huts ; the enemy, taken by surprise, tried to make their escape, but were pent in like sheep, and slaughtered by the Romans. The two armies were scattered ; Syphax left the Carthagi- nians, and returned to his own country. Masinissa now set himself up as a competitor for his throne, and march- ed against him : the subjects of Syphax joined him in great masses, and Laelius accomplished the undertak- ing. Syphax was taken prisoner. Masinissa followed up his advantage, and made himself master of Cirta, the chief town, afterwards called Constantineh, a name which it still bears. There the wife of Syphax was found, and Masinissa immediately married her, without asking the consent of the Romans. But Scipio was positive in his demand, that Sophonis, as a Carthagi- nian woman and an enemy of the Romans, should be given up ; Masinissa, not wishing to let her suffer such a fate, sent her poison, and she killed herself. Part of the kingdom of Syphax was given to his son ; he himself was sent as a prisoner to Italy, and led in the triumph of Scipio : he died an old man at Alba in the country of the Marsians. His statues must have been common : there are still several pedestals which have his name and a summary of his history. The Carthaginians became convinced that their force was not sufficient ; they had indeed succeeded in an at- tempt against the Roman ships, but this was also the only time during the three years of the war in Africa. They sent word to Hannibal and Mago that both of them were to come, which was good news for Italy ; yet as it was uncertain, whether the transport of the armies was possible, the Carthaginians also made Scipio pro- posals of peace, to which he listened the more readily, as he had now for three years been proconsul in Africa, and had always to expect his dismissal, in which case the consul of the following year, Ti. Claudius Nero, 138 THE SECOND PUXIC WAll. would have carried away the glory of having ended the war. Moreover, the issue of tho contest with Hannibal was still very doubtful ; and therefore the conditions of Scipio, hard as they were, were yet tolerable in compa- rison with what happened afterwards. The indepen- dence of the Carthaginians was acknowledged ; they were to be masters of the whole tract of country within the Punic canal, (what its extent was, is uncertain ;) to give up Italy, Spain, Sicily, and Sardinia, and like- wise all their ships but thirty, probably triremes, and to deliver up the prisoners of war : how much was asked by way of payment for the expenses of the war, is un- certain. Livy says that the annalists stated the num- bers very differently : the exact numbers which we meet with in the later Greek writers (fifteen hundred talents in Appian), are taken from these statements, between which Livy does not venture to decide. The latter mentions also a great quantity of corn. On these con- ditions, the rulers of Carthage were resolved to make peace ; but quite different was the feeling of the rest- less, unruly populace, who fiercely raved against the peace, without, however, being willing to shed a drop of their own blood. These were in despair. After having gloriously fought for so long, were they, it was said, to declare themselves vanquished, while Hannibal was still alive ? for the great mass of the people certainly looked upon him as an idol. In the meanwhile, the govern- ment carried its point, and a truce was concluded, and ambassadors sent to Rome. There the peace was ac- cepted on condition that Hannibal should leave Italy. But the Carthaginians now heard that Hannibal was really going to evacuate Italy, and they thought that they might try a different tack. The peace was all but Bworn to, when a large Roman fleet, which had arrived with provisions, but had not yet landed them, was driven from its moorings by a storm. Carthage had for a long time been in want of food, and the people murmured at this supply being allowed to go to the enemy, when the THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. 139 gods themselves were against them, and they could take it if they liked ; so they embarked in a riotous manner, and cut out the Roman ships, which, relying on the truce, had cast anchor there. Scipio on this sent en- voys to remonstrate, and to demand satisfaction. This, however, was not to be had, such was the general fermen- tation, and the Roman emissaries got away with great difficulty ; it was only under the protection of a guard, that they managed to return to their ship, which—- contrary, it is true, to the wish of the government — was chased by a Carthaginian vessel, and had to save itself, by running ashore. This story reminds one of the murder of the French ambassadors at Rastadt. All hope of peace was now utterly gone, and the Carthagi- nian ambassadors were commanded to withdraw from Rome. Mago bad landed from Spain at Genua, had taken it, and was trying to change Liguria into a Carthaginian province ; just as the Romans had spread in Spain from one single place. Yet he made but little progress in the Apennines and in the Alps, as he had to deal with a host of unmanageable petty tribes. Although indeed he got reinforcements and money, his means at first were inconsiderable ; yet he always obliged the Romans to employ some forces against him. Once he defeated them in the country of the Insubrians : so that, if he had not now been recalled, he would certainly have given them a great deal of trouble. He embarked, but died of the wounds which he had received in that engage- ment. Hannibal had likewise had positive orders to embark, and one cannot understand why the Romans did not do their utmost to destroy his fleet: he reached Africa without an accident. Against Carthag« itself, the Ro- mans were not able to undertake anything : it was too strong a town. Nor had Scipio as yet taken any other city that was fortified, though he was master of many open places. Hannibal landed near Adrumetum; ha 140 THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. had taken with him all those whom he could find in Bruttium able to bear arms, and he had embodied among his troops all the Roman and Italian deserters, whose only chance of life depended on the war with Rome. His army consisted of about forty thousand men. Yet when he beheld the state of things at Carthage, he made an attempt to negotiate; for he saw how unlikely it was that the war would be successfully carried on, arid he knew well that, if a battle were lost, the city would obtain- a peace from which it might never recover. Scipio likewise was very anxious for peace ; for he was always afraid that they would not prolong his imperium. The conditions which Hannibal offered, were too low, as he demanded for the Carthaginians the sovereignty over Africa, leaving indeed to the Romans the countries which they had conquered, but refusing everything else ; Scipio still wished to keep to the former condi- tions, with a trifling compensation for the wrong which had been done. All was spoilt at last by the folly of the Carthaginian people, who, now that Hannibal was come, thought that Scipio's army would be destroyed like that of Regulus ; and thus the famous battle of Zama was brought on (550). Hannibal, according to the testimony of Polybius, here also displayed the qualities of a great gen- eral. He drew up his army in three lines. The foremost was formed of a medley of foreign troops enlisted from among the most opposite races ; behind these were plac- ed the Carthaginian citizens, who only took up arms in times of the utmost need, but were forced by these very circumstances to be brave ; behind these again, as a re- serve, were the Italians whom he had brought over, and they were a considerable body : in front of the whole were eighty elephants, and on the wings were the ca- valry. This is the only battle in which Hannibal made use of elephants. The Romans were set in their usual array of hastati, principes, and triarii, save only that Scipio left large spaces between each of these three di- visions, whereas otherwise they were so placed behind THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. 141 each other, that the maniples of the one always covered the intervals between two maniples of the others. In these wide spaces, as well as in front of the lines, he put the light troops, that when the elephants approached, they might hurl their missiles at them, and then, should they enter these open lanes, assail them with javelins. On the wings, he set the Numidian and Roman horse. The result of the battle shows that this cavalry was now superior, in quality at least, to that of the Carthagi- nians ; for the latter was soon put to flight. The object with regard to the elephants was partly attained, as most of them ran right through these lanes, although there were some, who turned themselves sideways upon the men who were armed with javelins. Now began the shock between the hastati and the Carthaginian mercenaries, who, after a gallant fight, were forced to throw them- selves upon the Carthaginian phalanx behind them, but were driven back again by these upon the Romans ; so that they were trampled down between the two. The hastati, however, had to give way before the Carthagi- nians ; Scipio then made them fall back, and the prin- cipes and the triarii move sideways towards the wings, so as to attack the Carthaginians in the flank : this had the fullest success. The Italians alone fought with des- perate courage ; but the Carthaginian cavalry had been all destroyed, and the Romans burst upon the Cartha- ginian rear, on which the rout became such, that nearly the whole of the army was cut to pieces. Hannibal him- self escaped with a small handful of men to Adrume- tum. Nothing else was now thought of in Carthage, but peace. It was the great Hannibal who principally ne- gotiated it, and accepted the conditions, which of course were much harder than the former ones ; the eagerness, however, of Scipio to hurry on the peace, was the saving of Carthage. Her independence was acknow- ledged ; the towns and provinces which had belonged to the Carthaginians in Africa before the war, they were 142 THE SECOND PUNIC WAR. indeed still to keep as subjects ; but in this there was trickery, as they were to prove, what they had possess- ed. Instead of thirty triremes being left to them, as at first, only ten were now allowed them ; they had to de- liver over their elephants, and were no more to tame any; they were to pay ten thousand Euboic talents (15,000,000 dollars) within fifty years; to give a hun- dred and fifty hostages to be chosen by the Romans themselves, (which was very hard, as hostages were so badly treated among the ancients ;) and to yield up all the Roman prisoners and deserters, and likewise the unfortunate Italians who had come over with Hannibal. Whether these were all put to death as rebels, or sold for slaves, is not told us by Livy, who indeed says not a word about the whole of this article : Appian has given the account of it, and therefore so did Polybius like- wise. They were moreover to acknowledge Masinissa as king of the Numidians within the boundaries pre- scribed by the Romans ; to conclude a passive alliance offensive and defensive, with the Romans, on whom, however, it was not to be binding ; and to feed and keep the Roman soldiers for six months longer. In Africa, they might wage war only with the consent of the Romans ; out of Africa, not at all ; and they were not to enlist mercenaries anywhere in Europe. Some fools in Carthage wanted to speak against these conditions ; but Hannibal seized hold of one Gisgo, and dragged him down from the platform on which he was haranguing. An outcry was raised about the violation of the liberty of the citizen; Hannibal, however, justi- fied himself, saying that ever since his ninth year, he had been for six and thirty years away from his coun- try, and therefore was not so accurately acquainted with the law ; that, moreover, he deemed the peace to be necessary. All men of sense had become aware that the peace was now unavoidable, and that matters would Lave taken a different turn, if Hannibal had been sup- ported at the right time. THE MACEDONIAN \r\A. 143 Scipio now evacuated Africa; all the Carthaginian ships of war were brought to sea, and there set tire to. Thus ended, after sixteen years, the second Punic war and the rivalry of Carthage. Rome had made an im- mense booty.* THE MACEDONIAN WAE.t IMMEDIATELY after the battle of Cannso, Philip III. of Macedon had sent ambassadors to Hannibal, and had concluded a treaty, which fell, by chance, into the hands of the Romans. Even without this accident, it could not have been kept secret, not at least for any length of time. By this treaty, of which we certainly read in Polybius a genuine text, and of which the form is not at all Greek, but quite foreign, undoubtedly Carthagi- nian, the two states had not after all bound themselves to much. Hannibal secured to Philip in case of victory, that the Romans were to give up their possessions be- yond beyond the Adriatic, Corcyra, Apollonia, Epidam- nus, the colony of Pharus, the Atintanians (an Epirote people), Dimalus, and the Parthinian Illyrians ; and in return for this, Philip was to let the Carthaginians have the supremacy over Italy. Had Philip then been what he became in his riper years, this alliance would have proved dangerous to the Romans. But they, with that perseverance and heroic courage which distinguished them in the whole war, sent out a fleet under the praa- tor M. Valerius Laevinus, to protect Illyria, and to raise a party against him in Greece. Hostilities began in the year 537, or 538 (Laevinus not being a consul, the « Here follows in the lectures of 1829 a very brief review of the state of things in Italy after the war of Hannibal, which, however, to avoid repetitions, I have made into one with the more explicit account, which follows after the war of Antiochus. — Germ. Edit. f The second war of Philip against the Romans is generally reckon, ed as the first Macedonian War ; we more correctly so call the uua which coincides with the war with Hannibal. THE MACEDONIAN WAK. commencement is not quite certain), and the war lasted until the peace of P. Sempronius 548. This war was carried on very sluggishly on the side of the Romans, and Philip, who had to limit his exertions only to the few points on the main-land of Illyria, could have made himself master of these, had he not managed his affairs quite as feebly. His conduct then gives us quite a dif- ferent idea of his powers from that which we are led to form afterwards. Had he given to Hannibal but ten thousand Macedonians as auxiliaries, Rome would have been in a sad plight ; but he was too vain to do so. Philip was at that time very young, hardly in his twenty-first or second year. His father Demetrius II. had left him at his death yet a child, and had given him for guardian an uncle, or elder cousin, Antigonus Epi- tropus (likewise called Doson). This Antigonus show- ed a conscientiousness which, considering the time in which he lived, really awakens our wonder ; he seems to have taken as much care of the education of his ward, as of his rights: of this we see the traces in Philip, especially in the first years of his reign, in which he is said to have been very amiable. But there was something bad-hearted in him, which soon shook off that influence : like an eastern youth, he then wallowed in lust. Yet he was endowed with remarkable talents ; he was highly gifted as a general, and he had courage and skill, to employ and to increase the resources of his empire. In the war against the Romans under Flami- ninus, he displayed much ability ; and when in the peace he had lost part of his kingdom, he cleverly took advan- tage of circumstances to be set up again by Rome her- self. Thus he managed to leave behind to his son a power, such as he himself had never possessed before. The empire of Macedon, during the latter days of An- tigonus Gonatas, had fallen into decay : the ^Etolians had risen, the Achaeans had made themselves free. Under Demetrius, it was going down hill still faster. From this condition, it only recoTered in the last years THE MACEDONIAN WAR. 145 of the guardianship of Antigonus, and that by the trea- son of old Aratus, who sacrificed the whole glory of a well-spent life ; for he chose, rather to yield up Corinth and the liberty of Greece, and to make the Achaeans sink into utter insignificance, than to let Cleomenes have that authority in the state, which was due to him, and without which the Lacedaemonians could not have join- ed the Achaean league. Philip, in the beginning of his reign, had, in conjunction with the Achseaus, under- taken a war against the ^Etolians, by which the latter were considerably humbled, important fortresses in Thessaly having been taken from them and their esti- mation in Greece lowered. They were obliged to agree to a disadvantageous peace, yet they still kept their in- dependence. When Philip leagued himself with Han- nibal, and began the war with the Romans, Greece was at peace. Thessaly, with the exception of that part which was ^Etolian, Phocis, Locris, Euboea with Chalcis, Corinth, Hersea, and Aliphera were well affected to Ma- cedon, and had Macedonian garrisons. The Achaeans were nominally free and united, but in reality dependent on their allies the Macedonians ; so were likewise the Boso- tians and Acarnanians. The yEtolians, who were hostile, were free, and had a territory of considerable extent. In Laceda?mon, at that time one revolution followed upon another: it was subjected to a nominal king, probably a son of Eudamidas ; but soon afterwards Machanidas seized upon the government. The Syrian kings ruled over Western Asia, with the exception of Caria and Samos, which, as well as the Hellespont, Chersonesus, and the towns on the southern coast of Thrace, belong- ed to Egypt. Chios, Lesbos, and Byzantium formed to- gether a confederacy of free cities. Rhodes was free, the mistress of the sea, and powerful ; she was a friend of the Romans, without being actually allied with them. Egypt and Syria were at war with each other. The former retained Ccelesyria when the peace was made ; but she lost the northern fortresses of Phoenicia to Syria, lil> THE MACEDONIAN WAR. The Athenians were on friendly terms with the Romans ; in their enfeebled state they kept aloof from all politi- cal activity. There was peace everywhere ; the eyes of Greece were already very much turned towards Rome. One would have thought that under these circum- stances Philip might have undertaken something of im- portance against Rome ; yet he did not exert himself. In the beginning of the contest, there were only little skirmishes going on, and he had some success ; he over- came the Atintanians, and also the Ardyseans in the north of Illyricum, who were under the protection of Rome. About the fourth year of the war, the Romans made an alliance with the JStolians, and from that time, unhappily for Greece, they became enterprising in those parts. They sent over indeed but one legion, in fact, only marines ; but they also had a fleet in those seas, which was of some consequence, as the Macedo- nians had scarcely any at all. Through the ^Etolians, the Romans also became connected with Attains, who having begun with the small realm of Pergamus, had conquered Lydia, and created a rich principality. The Roman fleets of Laevinus, and after him of Sulpicius, were a real curse for ill-fated Greece. The treaty with the ^Etolians stipulated, that of all the places beyond Cor- cyra which they should conquer together, the soil should belong to the ^Itolians, the inhabitants with their goods and chattels to the Romans. Such a stipulation is in- deed not unheard of ; yet it shows what the ^Etolians. really were. After the Lamian war, they deserve praise ; but all that happened afterwards, shows them to have been morally barbarians: their language may indeed have been partly Greek. This treaty had the saddest consequences. The Roman fleet made its appearance off the Greek coast ; JSgina, Dyme, Oreus, were taken, and the whole population swept away by the Romans. These two last places the ^Etolians were not able to Keep ; but JEgina with its harbour they sold to Attalus for thirty talents, — that noble Greek island to a prince THE MACEDONIAN WAR. 147 of Pergamus ! These atrocities drew upon the and Romans the abhorrence of the whole of Greece. Philip, who thereby became popular, penetrated with the Greeks, for the first time, into ^Etolia, and requited them in their own country for their devastations. The ^Etolians, abandoned by the Romans, concluded a very disadvantageous peace. Philip made considerable con- quests. Two or three years afterwards, (Livy's chrono- logy here is very little to be relied on,) about 548, the Romans also by means of Tib. Sempronius concluded a peace with Philip, beneath the conditions of which some great disadvantage again is veiled. Not only the coun- try of the Atintanians, which had become subject to them, — a district not unimportant of itself, but of very great consequence on account of the pass of Argyro- castro, through which Philip had now a free passage between the Roman territory and the then republic of Epirus, — was by it expressly ceded to Philip, but also the country of the Ardyaeans. The Romans, of course, had this mental reservation, that the time would not be long before they would break this peace, and gain back what they had lost. This is one of the few instances in which the Romans renounced part of their possessions. One ought to have remembered this, when such violent reproaches were made against Jovian, who, to save his army, ceded a tract of country to the Persians : there was an outcry at the time, as if such a thing had never happened before in the history of Rome. Aurelian had yielded Dacia to the Goths ; Hadrian had given up the conquests of Trajan in the east ; not to mention the peace with the Volscians in the earliest times. Philip, after having concluded peace with the Ro- mans, allied himself with Antiochus the Great against the infant Ptolemy Epiphanes, the child of the unwor- thy Ptolemy Philopator. The Egyptian kings since Philadelphus and Euergetes, were in possession of ex- tensive districts and strongholds on the coasts of Syria and Asia Minor, as far as the coast of Thrace : Lycia at 148 THE MACEDONIAN WAR. least was subject to their supremacy. As under Pto- lemy Philopator the empire had already fallen into ut- ter decay, and his infant successor was growing up under the charge of an unworthy guardian, Antiochua and Philip took advantage of the moment. Egypt had since the rise of the Alexandrine empire been on friend- ly terms with Rhodes, and the Rhodians had a strong interest in being friends with Alexandria, as they had much more to fear from Macedon than from Egypt; they therefore defended Epiphanes. Yet their power was no match for that of Macedon and Syria ; especially as the wretched Egyptian government hardly did any- thing, but on the contrary let the allies, among whom, besides Rhodes, there were also Byzantium, Chios, and Attalus of Pergamus, bear the whole brunt of the war. The two kings were therefore most successful. Philip conquered for himself the whole of the Thracian coast ; Perinthus, Ephesus, and Lycia, fell to the lot of Syria, although the allies of the Egyptians had shortly before had some success in a sea-fight near Chios. Philip had now reached the pinnacle of his greatness. Even from Crete, where Macedon had never before exercised any influence, he was applied to for his me- diation. The immediate cause, or at least the pretext for the second Macedonian war, was afforded to the Romans by the distress of Athens. That city was utterly impover- ished and decayed ; but it kept up a sort of indepen- dence, and as early as about twenty-five years after the first Illyrian war, it had made an alliance with the Ro- mans, and had granted them isopolity. * Perhaps the Romans received the gift with a smile ; yet such bright rays of her old departed glory still lingered upon Athens, that on her side at least, there was nothing ridiculous in the proffer. Pausanias tells us, that among the cenotaphs for those who had been slain, there were * See above, p. 48. THE MACEDONIAN WAR. 149 also some for the men belonging to three triremes, who had fallen in battle abroad as allies of the Romans ; but he does not give the date. It is not likely that this was a figment of the Athenians ; the time may have been that of the second Illyrian war, as they were keen enough to see that they might gain the Romans by sending them a few ships. During the first Macedonian war, they very wisely kept neutral ; but in the last years of the war of Hannibal they got involved in hostilities with Philip. The murder of two young Acarnanians who had intruded when the Eleusinian mysteries were celebrated, led their countrymen to call upon Philip for help. He had long wished to get possession of Athens, and he now savagely devastated the whole of Attica to the very walls of the city : all the temples in the Athe- nian territory were pulled down, and even the tombs were demolished. The Athenians betook themselves to the Rhodians, to Attalus, and in general to all the al- lies of that suddenly decayed Alexandrine empire, which had once been so highly blooming under Euergetes ; yet their hopes were chiefly bent upon the Romans. In Rome there was much consultation what to do. The senate and the leading men, who already had unbound' ed views of extending the Roman power, would not have hesitated for a moment to declare war, and the more so, as they were likewise eager to make up for what they had lost by the unfortunate issue of the former one : but the people, who were most wretchedly off, and longed for rest, threw out the first motion for a war. It is a most erroneous thing, for one to believe that a \ constitution remains the same, so long as its outward/ forms still last. When alterations have taken place in Y the distribution of property, in public opinion, and in the way in which people live, the constitution, even) without any outward change, may become quite differ- ) ent from what it was, and the self-same form may at one time be democratical, and at another aristocratical. This internal revolution is hardly ever traced by modern 150 THE MACEDONIAN WAR. writers of history, and yet it is one of those very things which in history ought to be particularly searched into. That strange and wonderful preponderance of the oli- garchy of wealth existed already at that time in Rome, and the many— who generally speaking have neither judgment nor a will of their own — now decree the very things which they did not wish. Here indeed we have one of the first and most remarkable symptoms of this : the people, contrary to their own wishes, vote for the war with Philip. It was the great misfortune of Rome, that after the war of Hannibal, there was no great man who had the genius to restore the constitution in ac- cordance with its spirit. For great states always de- cline and fall, because, after great exertions, every thing is left to the blind spirit of the age, and no healing of what is diseased is attempted. The Romans now, with great zeal, sent ambassadors to Philip to demand indemnification for the Athenians, and cessation of all hostilities against the allies of Rome, to the number of whom Ptolemy also belonged. Philip clearly saw that this was but a pretext to raise a quar- rel, and he had bitterly to repent of not having taken better advantage of the war with Hannibal. In the year 652, the war was decreed, and the command was given to the consul P. Sulpicius Galba, who had already made a campaign before in those parts, though not of the most glorious kind, as he devastated Dyme, Oreus, and ^Egina. It must have been resolved upon late in the season, and as the consul besides fell ill, nothing more could be undertaken that year : Galba's expedi- tion therefore entirely belongs to the year which follow- ed his consulship, a fact which is overlooked by Livy. Villius, the next consul, was only present at the seat of war for a very short period, towards the end of his time of office. In Greece, the jEtolians just then were very much weakened, but independent, and hostile to Macedon. They possessed JEtotia, part of Acarnania, the country THE MACEDONIAN WAR. lo'l of the JSnianians, that of the Ozolian Locrians, most of Phthiotis, the land of the Dolopians, part of southern Thessaly, and Thermopylae ; and they had isopolity with Lacedseraon, and with a number of distant places in Elis and Messene : yet for the last thirty years they had been going down hill. In the Peloponnesus, the Achse- ans held Achaia, Sicyon, Phlius, and Argolis, and Arca- dia ; but in reality they were entirely dependent on the Macedonians, and were protected by them against Mto- lia and Lacedaemon. The Lacedaemonians were confined within very narrow limits in their old country, and they had lost their ancient constitution ; they had no ephors, perhaps not even a senate, but they were ruled by a ty- rant, Nabis, one of the worst of monsters. The Messe- nians stood apart from the ^Etolians and Achaeans, and were become sworn foes to the latter ; the Eleans were independent, and leagued with the ^Etolians ; the Boeo- tians remained independent in appearance only, under the supremacy of Macedon; Corinth, Euboea, Phocis, Locris, were nominally allies of the Macedonians, but in fact were subject to their rule. Thessaly was held to be a state which had become blended with Macedon. In Epirus, the house of the ^Eacidaa was extirpated, and the remainder of the people hemmed in by the JStolians, formed a republic, sometimes under JStolian, and at other times under Macedonian influence. On the Greek mainland, Athens survived as a mere name, without a connexion belonging to her, an object of Philip's hate. The Acarnanians were, properly speaking, none of the subjects of the Macedonians, but were only united with them by their common enmity against the ^Etolians. The Cyclades had formerly belonged to Egypt, and they were now in an unsettled state. Crete was indepen- dent, but torn by factions, owing to which Philip had been called upon to mediate. Chios and Mitylene were free ; Rhodes was great and powerful ; Byzantium also was free, and allied with Chios and Mitylene : they had taken as little part as possible in all the quarrels ; but 152 THE MACEDONIAN WAR. now they were drawn into them, particularly Chios, and in a league with Attalus. As to their intellectual life, the Greeks were utterly fallen. There were indeed still some schools at Athens ; but poesy was dead, and even the art of speech, that last blossom of the Greek spirit, had vanished away, and had sought a new home among the Asiatic peoples which had been hellenized, but with- out imbibing any of the excellencies of the Greek na- tion. Most places were mere shadows of what they had been ; there were but few indeed which had not been de- stroyed more than once : of the number of those spared was Corinth, which therefore was the most flourishing of all Greek towns. The Achaeans, ever since Aratus, out of spite to the Lacedaemonians, had given over his country into the hands of the Macedonians, were mere clients to their new patrons. Owing to this connexion, which had lasted nearly twenty years, they had many a time received the deepest cause for provocation ; but they were on bad terms with their neighbours, and if their patriots had any wish, it was to have their depen- dence upon Macedon changed into a freer form of client- ship ; none, however, dreamed of independence. But then many were filled with bitter indignation at the cruelty with which several towns had been laid waste by the Romans. The ^Etolians felt inclined to undei'- take the war ; but they did not come to any decision, a misunderstanding having arisen between them and the Romans, whom they reproached with having given them unfounded hopes, whilst, on the other hand, the Romans complained of not having been supported by them in the Illyrian war. In the first campaign of Sulpicius (553), the Romans could do nothing : they took the bull by the horns, and attacked Macedon from Illyria. Philip kept on the de- fensive. That part of Illyria, as far as Scutari, is a country of rather low hills, very much like Franconia ; in many places it is flat. On the eastern frontier, near Macedon, a ridge of high mountains runs down, which THE MACEDONIAN WAR. 153 takes in western Macedon, and from Scodrus, or Scar- dus, reaches southwards to Pindus and Parnassus. This range of mountains, lofty and broad, cold, barren, and naturally poor, is now hardly inhabited any longer ; even the valleys are inhospitable. Here are the highlands of Macedon, the true home of the earliest Macedonians, who had formerly held under their own liege-lords, be- ing dependent upon Philip, but at that time were en- tirely united with Macedon. The Romans found every thing here against them : nearly the whole of the popu- lation, consisting as it did of Macedonians, was hostile with the exception of the Epirote Orestians, and provi- sions were scarce everywhere. Sulpicius therefore re- treated, and passed the winter in the fertile country of lower Illyria, near Apollonia and Epidamnus. However carefully historians may disguise the fact, certain it is that his undertaking was a complete failure. T. Quinctius Flamininus, immediately after his being made consul, in the year 554, led reinforcements across the Adriatic, and changed the whole plan. This time also, the Macedonians had fortified their frontiers, and they kept on the defensive. The principal camp of the king was near what is now Argyrocastro, the old Anti- gonea, founded by Pyrrhus, where the Aous — so we must read instead of Apsus, in Plutarch's life of Flamininus — has worn its way between two high ridges of limestone : both these mountain ranges are wild and impassable ; they stretch out on one side as far as the Acroceraunian heights, on the other towards Pindus. The place can- not be mistaken from its very nature (fauces Antigo- iiece) ; even to this day, the true road from Illyria into the interior of Epirus passes through it, part of which, on the brink of the river, is cut in the mountains. The Romans had renewed their alliance with the JEtolians, who took up arms and threatened the frontier of Thes- saly, but undertook nothing of consequence. Philip was much bent on hindering the jEtolians, now that they were the allies of the Romans, from attacking the Thes- 154 THE MACEDONIAN WAR. salian frontiers in right earnest, and uniting with them ; and this he effected by taking up his position near An- tigonea. Before this defile, Villius also who, when Fla- mininus arrived, was still in Greece, had during his pro-consulship stood his ground against Philip ; yet it was hopeless to attack him in front, and several at- tempts had miscarried. Perhaps the Romans expected that the JEtolians would compel the Macedonian army to change their position, as otherwise it would be in- comprehensible why they should have encamped in that place. Flamininus, who now entered upon the consulship, was a distinguished man, and had moreover been chosen by the people before he was thirty years old, owing to their confidence in his personal qualities. It is indeed a proof of the utter falsehood of the notion that the Ro- mans had only in later times sought to make themselves acquainted with Greek literature, when we find it dis- tinctly stated of men like Flamininus that they were imbued with Greek learning. His conduct towards Greece is not indeed to be approved of in every respect ; but he was provoked, when his noble attempt to win her applause, was darkened by the ingratitude of a na- tion which was already partly degenerated. Had the Greeks been able to suit themselves to the actual state of things, they might have been spared many a sad ex- perience. Flamininus became convinced that it was necessary to try and drive the Macedonians from their vantage ground, and he attained his end by means of that faithlessness then so general in Greece. He tam- pered with a chieftain belonging to the Epirote repub- lic of the name of Charops ; and the latter, being gained over by money and promises, undertook to lead a small Roman division of four thousand men through unknown roads to the rear of the Macedonian army. The Ro- mans did not indeed trust their guides, and they car- ried them bound along with them ; but no treachery was committed, and on the third day they reached the THE MACEDONIAN WAR. 155 heights above the Macedonians. That day had been ap- pointed for the attack. At sunrise, Flamininus began the battle in front, and thus engaged the attention of the Macedonians ; he had already lost a great many men, when the detachment which had gone round the Mace- donians, gave the signal with fire from the heights. He now renewed the attack with redoubled vigour: the other Romans fell upon the Macedonians from the roar, and these were panic-struck and fled ; so that the Romans by one blow became masters of Epirus, where all the towns opened their gates to them. Philip escap- ed across mount Pindus into Thessaly. Flamininus did not follow, as he wished first to take advantage of these circumstances, entirely to drive the Macedonians out of Greece. But an expedition to Thessaly had no great results. He united with the ^Etolians in Ambracia, and took up his winter quarters in Phocis, where he besieged the strong town of Elatea. During the campaign, the combined fleet of Attalus, the Rhodians, and the Romans, was in the Greek seas ; they made several undertakings, which, however, led to nothing but the ravaging of unhappy Greece. Thus Chalcis, once so flourishing, was destroyed and pillaged. The Achseans had before been obliged to give up Me- gara and Corinth to Philip, who had likewise kept Or- chomenus without asking their leave ; at a later period only, that is to say at the beginning of the second war, he gave it back to them. Had he now after his defeat, likewise restored to them Corinth, they would hardly have forsaken him ; for they had an implacable hatred against the _6rt must look upon Carthage as having been with regard to //.V art and beauty like the fine towns of Greece, but with ^^ much more of Roman grandeur and massiveness : the /j^t* building of stately streets is ascribed to them by the Romans as a thing peculiarly their own; the Greeks knew nothing of it.) There was now the same struggle as at Saragossa. House after house was defended and taken ; the enemy broke through the party-walls, they fought from room to room, and when they had forced their way up the stairs, and driven the unfortunate in- mates from the last stories, they tried to throw bridges from the roofs across the streets. The superior strength of the Romans assured them the victory, besides which, a most fearful famine was raging in the city where peo- ple were already feeding on dead bodies : and yet the be- sieged would not hear of surrender, though indeed such a thing could hardly have been mooted, as Hasdrubal had treated the Roman prisoners with the most horrible barbarity. When, after much bloodshed, part of the city was already taken, the Romans stopped short, and set fire to the buildings ; on which the Carthaginians, flee- ing before the flames, pulled up the houses, and thus raised up a huge mound of rubbish against the wall and the citadel: the harrowing description of this fire is evidently from Polybius, the unfortunate eye-witness of the horrors which now took place. The soldiers deli- berately buried the wounded alive under the ruins ! Thus the old town was reached, and now every one tried only to save himself; the priests went as suppliants with signs of truce, and begged for mercy : Scipio then caused it to be announced that the lives of those who would come out should be spared. On this, the people which still survived, fifty thousand in number, came forth ; the Roman deserters only, with Hasdrubal and his family, retreated to the highest part of the citadel, a most hal- THE THIRD PUNIC WAR. place which was called ' Aa-*A»i«-«ioj/. Hasdrubal was base enough to sue for his life ; but his wife slew her children, and cursing him, even from the pinnacle of the temple, threw herself into the flames, an example which was followed by the deserters. Thus Scipio be- came master of a heap of smouldering ruins drenched with blood. Much must, however, have been preserved, as he took from the temples many Sicilian trophies, which he sent back to that island. Neither Tarentum nor Capua had been destroyed by the senate ; but Sci- pio had to raze Carthage to the ground at their com- mand. He now completed the work already begun, and drove a plough-share across the site as a sign of its everlasting desolation: the army, when it went 'away, left only that utter wilderness in the midst of which Marius seated himself sixty years afterwards. The pri- soners were treated with more or less humanity : most of them were sold for slaves, some also were slain ; a few of those of higher rank met with a better fate, and were distributed among the Italian towns. Bithyas was one of these ; their race and their name perished from the earth. The Romans, whose forefathers had put to death the great C. Pontius, spared the life of Hasdrubal : he was kept for the triumph. Carthage had stood for seven hundred years. Part of its territory was given to the Numidian kings, the three sons of Masinissa ; the rest became a Roman province, under the rule of a proconsul or praetor. THE PSEUDO-PHILIP. THE ACHAEAN WAR. DESTRUCTION OF CORINTH. WHEN Carthage was overpowered, the Macedonian war was already ended, and Corinth near its downfall. The Macedonian war of Andriscus is a striking example of the way in which the whole of a people may be taken THE PSEUDO-PHILIP. 245 in. The false Demetrius, as he was called, was in the opinion of those who knew history .well, by no means an impostor : but he had been brought up in Poland, had gone over to the Roman catholic religion, and had adopted European manners ; whence the mistrust which he met with in Russia. There is a very strong likeli- hood that cne of the Sebastians in Portugal, was the true king : (Lessing, in the " Literatur brief e" has also written a masterly article on this subject, though it was one which was out of his beat.) But Andriscus was really an impostor, most likely a Thracian gladiator ; heaven knows how he could have dreamed of the ven- turesome idea of giving himself out as the son of Per- seus : perhaps he bore some likeness to him. Such per- sonifications are not unseldom attempted in the East ; in Europe, some instances of the kind are met with in the middle ages. The war had already broken out when Scipio became consul, perhaps even a year before : (the destruction of Carthage was in the time of his procon- sulship.) Perseus and his sons were, after the triumph of JEmi- lius Paullus, sent as prisoners to Alba on the lake Fuci- nus, where they were treated in a way which clearly showed that their extinction was determined on. The king did not outlive this cruel usage more than two years ; he had so childishly clung to life, that he would not listen to the hints of JSmilius Paullus, to take it himself: they probably killed him by constantly dis- turbing his sleep. His eldest son died in the same man- ner ; the youngest lived in the most abject degradation. Being clever, he learnt the Latin language, and earned his daily bread as clerk to the municipal council of Al- ba : beyond this, we have no further trace of him. During the Carthaginian war, Andriscus now set forth that he was a son of Perseus, and he found a party in Macedonia ; being, however, unable to stand his ground, he went to Demetrius in Syria, and was by him given up to the Romans. Such an act is just what one would 246 THE PSEUDO-PHILIP. have expected from Demetrius, who had every reason to do his best to regain his footing with the Romans, now that he had only just escaped being punished by them. He had fled indeed from Rome after the death of his brother Antiochus Epiphanes, to secure the throne; and the Romans had sent commissioners to Syria, on hearing that the Syrians, contrary to the existing trea- ties, were keeping elephants, and had moreover built a greater number of ships than they were allowed. One of these commissioners was slain in a riot at Laodicea, and Demetrius, with great difficulty, turned aside the vengeance of the Romans, by yielding up the murderers and killing the elephants, Under these circumstances, it was but natural that Andriscus was given up. At Rome, this man was, as an adventurer, held in such contempt, that he was not properly guarded ; and he again made his escape. He came to Thrace, where the Romans were already feared and hated ; all sorts of peo- ple flocked to him there, and he made an inroad into Macedon. A war in that country was very inconve- nient to the Romans, who were engaged in their enter- prise against Carthage, and had no troops in the north of Greece. To the amazement of every body, Andriscus routed the Macedonians on the eastern bank of the Strymon ; he then crossed the river, and beat them once more, whereupon they all joined him. His success was quite wonderful ; he put on the diadem under the name of Philip. Things must at that time have been in a very dismal state in Macedon. The Romans had brought in the wretched republican constitution, and the most eminent men had been led away to Italy ; so that the people, who from the earliest times had been accustom- ed to kingly rule, eagerly caught at this hope of better- ing its lot. In Thessaly also, he found partizans. Na- sica, who happened to be there, got together the contin- gents of the Greeks, and with their aid repulsed Philip when he invaded it : at that time, therefore, the Greeks were still faithful. Andriscus was a tyrannical fellow THE PSEUDO-PHILIP. 247 at bottom: Polybius calls him . Yet he kaew how to make himself respected : his armaments were on an extraordinary scale, and he ventured to wage war even against the Roman praetor, P. Juventius Thalna ; after having beaten him, he marched once more into Thessaly. Matters looked serious enough: Q. Metellus, the praetor, was obliged to go with a large army to Greece, where he landed on the coast, which could not have been easily defended ; in the meanwhile, the Achaeans already showed themselves very mutinous, and the war, if it lasted, could not but lead to a rising. Metellus drove the king from Thessaly, who, like Per- seus, fell back upon Pydna, followed by the Romans. The Macedonians, who were superior in numbers, divid- ed their forces for a foray ; and Metellus took advan- tage of this, and attacked and utterly routed them. The conquest of Macedonia in this insurrection was not, however, so easy as the former one had been ; for many places held out, expecting a worse fate. On this occa- sion Pella must have been destroyed : Dio Chrysostom, in the first century after the birth of Christ, speaks of it as a ruined city ; it now lies buried under mounds of earth, and is only to be traced by the row of hills which marked its site. Undoubtedly the most interesting an- tiquities might be found there, especially works of art ; but unfortunately, the present condition of European affairs gives little hope of any thorough researches be- ing made there so very soon. Andriscus was taken pri- soner in Thrace, and put to death : Macedon became a regular province, and from henceforth a governor seems to have been constantly sent thither ; its few remaining privileges were taken away. Had the Achasans known what they wanted, the re- volt of the pseudo-Philip would have been the moment for them to act : but they allowed themselves to be be- guiled into folly and absurdity. Although we cannot disguise from ourselves, that the causes which hastened on the fall of Achaia, were disgraceful to the Achaeans, 248 THE ACH^AN WAR. yet it is a fact that its ruin made the condition of the survivors not better but worse ; and this awakens our sympathy for them. And moreover, this degenerate people still had among them many excellent men. The Romans had for a long time been bent on the destruc- tion of Achaia, and by means of traitors, such as Calli- crates and Andronidas, they ruled there with unlimited sway; hence causes for grievances arose, and when those fellows had once gained a settled position, they too were no longer as ready to do the dirty work as before. The catastrophe was wholly brought on by one unhappy violent act of the otherwise excellent Philo- p «men, a man who was justly called the last of the Greeks. He entertained from his. very childhood a deadly hatred against Sparta, since Cleomenes had de- stroyed his native town of Megalopolis ; and to bring down Sparta, was what he ever had most at heart. He took advantage of Rome's being entangled in the war of Autiochus, to compel Sparta to join the Achaean league, and to adopt its customs and forms; for among the Achaeans, unlike the other confederacies of the same kind in the ancient world, such a, fusion existed. Achaia then comprised the whole of the Peloponnesus : that strange federal system was full as mischievous as that of our unfortunate German confederacy, in which the least of the petty princes has just as good a vote as he on whom the safety of the country hinges ; — or as the state of things in America before the constitution of Washington, when Delaware with seventy thousand in- habitants, had an equal vote with Virginia, the popula- tion of which amounted to half a million ; or as in the republics of the Netherlands, where Zeeland, which paid thr je per cent, of the taxes, had by its votes as much weight as Holland which paid fifty-eight per cent. This absurdity was the ruin of the Achaean league. Elis was a large town and country, while Lacedaemon, even after the ssa-coast had been already severed from it, was yet greater than, all Achaia ;. nevertheless, each of the twelve THE ACH.EAN WAR. 249 little Achaean townships, many of which were not larger than some of our German villages,* had just as many votes as Lacedaemon. But the second article was the most galling of all. Even as Sicyon had adopted the Achaean vopipx, which was all very well, so was Sparta likewise to do away with the laws of Lycurgus, to which it had clung with so much pride, and to put up with those of the Achaeans : this was done some years before the war with Perseus. Spartiates, in the true sense of the word, there were none at that time, but only Lace- daemonians ; the former had died away, and since the days of Cleomenes, the population of the town, which consisted of descendants of the Perioacians and Neoda- inodes, under the name of Lacedaemonians, stepped into the full rights of citizens. But as these Lacedaemonians had adopted the laws and the a'/ayi of Lycurgus, and prided themselves in them, it was a great piece of cruel- ty in Philopoemen to force them to drop them again : for this was a change which was felt throughout the whole business of every day life. Moreover, there is not much to be said in praise of the Achaean forms, and however little good there may have been in the Spartan system, if it did nothing else, it, made good soldiers. For these reasons, the Lacedaemonians strove to rid them- selves of this hateful alliance, and there were long nego- tiations in consequence : yet it was still binding on them in the beginning of the seventh century, when even a Lacedaemonian, Menalcidas, was the general of the Achae- an league. About this time, some unlucky quarrels having arisen between the Oropians and Athenians, the former bribed Menalcidas with ten talents to help them. The assist- ance, however, came too late ; notwithstanding which he exacted the money from them, and though he had previously promised part of it to Callicrates, he kept the whole for himself. From the charge which the latter , * Literally, " villages as large as Sinzig." 250 THE ACHJEAN WAR. brought against him, sprang all the woes which befell Achaia. Menalcidas did his utmost to sever Lacedse- oion from the league, and he succeeded. At the time of the negotiations which took place about it at Rome, both Menalcidas and the Achaean ambassador deceived the people who had sent them: each of them carried home a false decision. It was just then the most un- fortunate period of the third Punic war. Lacedaemon now severed itself, and a war broke out between the Achseans and Lacedaemonians, in which the latter had the worst of it : for Menalcidas was a wretched general, and they were so hard pressed that they had to consent to an agreement by which the Achaeans got every thing that they wanted. Menalcidas laid hands upon his own life, and the Lacedaemonians again joined the Achaean league. When the Romans, in the year 605, now saw that they were about to overthrow Carthage, they also took a different tone towards Achaia. The Achaeans had acted in direct disobedience to them, and had thus drawn down their vengeance upon themselves, although they had remained faithful during the revolt of the pseudo- Philip, and had given them their aid. But the very prosperity of Achaia may have led the Romans to break it up. Its extent in those times cannot be stated with exactness : it very likely took in the whole of Pe- loponnesus and Megara, and although Attica, Phocis, and Locris did not belong to it, several places yet far- ther off, by having isopolity, were in the league ; for in- stance, Heraclea, by mount Oeta, Pleuron, in ^Etolia. The Roman commissioners, C. Aurelius Orestes and his colleagues, appeared at Corinth, and announced it to be the will of the Roman senate, that Lacedsemon should be declared independent ; and that all the places, which, at the time of the alliance with Philip, had not belong- ed to Achaia, but had been under Philip's sway, should be separated from it : these were Corinth, Orchomenus in Arcadia, Heraclea, Pleuron. (Whether Elis and THE ACH-SAN WAR. 251 Messine belonged to the same category, is more than we know, as Appian's notices are so scanty : the excerpta of Constantinus Porphyrogenitus will very likely still bring to light a great deal more of this period.) This was about the half of the Peloponnesus, and the most dis- tinguished of their towns. The Achaean council, then assembled in Corinth, would not listen to the end of this message ; they ordered the doors to be thrown open, and the people to be called together to hear the insolence of the Romans. The rage of the people was beyond all bounds : the Romans returned to their lodgings, with- out having gotten an answer ; the citizens spread them- selves about the town and fell upon the Lacedaemonians ; everywhere the houses were searched to see whether any Lacedaemonian had hidden himself within, and not even that of the Roman ambassadors was spared. The first of these, Aurelius Orestes, was bent upon revenge ; but the Roman senate was not yet inclined to inflict im- mediate punishment. We find it often stated that Co- rinth had been destroyed ob pidsatos kgatos; this is not to be understood literally of personal violence, pulsars being the technical expression for every violation of the law of nations. Even a derogatory appettatio of the ambassador, by which his dignity was insulted, was termed puLsatio, The Roman senate did not trust its allies, and again sent commissioners ; so that the Achaeans might have easily saved themselves by submission. The demand of the Romans was a most glaring injustice; but unhap- pily there is henceforward in all the dealings of the Ro- man people with foreign nations, nothing but insolence and unrighteousness. And yet, now that the moral in- terest of the Roman history is quite at an end, a new one begins : the history of Rome becomes neither more nor less than the general history of those ages, and the events in the latter which find no place in the former, are so insignificant that they cannot be made into an independent history. Now though the Achaeans could 252 THE AGILE AN AVAR. hardly have succeeded in getting the Romans to desist from their demands, they ought at all events to have submitted to their will: it was madness to kick against it. But it was with them as with the ill-fated Jews, in that last struggle with the Romans of which we read the history in Josephus ; those who had the language of freedom on their lips, were the fiercest ty- rants of the nation. He who votes for yielding to ne- cessity, is often held to be a vile traitor ; the man, on the contrary, who is for risking everything, is looked up to as a lover of his country. The prophet Jeremy already had good reason to complain of the false pro- phets who beguiled the people to mad undertakings. Just so it was with the Achaeans. Those among them who talked the most loudly of freedom, were by no means its best friends ; the true patriots indeed were those who gave their advice for peace. The Romans were now still waiting for more favourable circumstances, as they were not in a condition to take the field, on account of the Macedonian and Punic wars : embassies therefore went backwards and forwards on both sides. Achaia had formerly been under the lead of Callicrates, one of its citizens, who had sold himself to the Romans; and it was now under the influence of a couple of madmen, Critolaus and Diseus, his most violent foes, who were for resistance, even to the last gasp. Critolaus amused the Roman ambassadors. As the Achaeans only met twice a-year, he now sent to call one of these meetings, and promised to introduce the Roman ambassadors ; but he secretly warned all the members not to come, and then declared that, according to the laws, a new assembly could not be held for six months. The Achaeans now armed themselves. Yet one can hardly conceive how so small and insignificant a people could have the madness even to dream of being able to stand against the Romans. During the fifty years which had elapsed since they had been under their protection, they had been quite inactive : they had only carried on THE ACH.EAN WAR. 253 petty and trifling wars, and as they had ceased to have a standing army, they had nothing but militia, which was still to be properly trained. They had spent their time, while they were well off, in sensual indulgence, and had neglected everything which they ought to have done for their armament ; so that they were not pre- pared for the chance of a danger which might try their utmost strength, as may be seen from the newly dis- covered fragments of Polybius. A wanton luxury and moral degeneracy, the contemplation of which awakens most dismal thoughts, was now rife among them. They came, as we have said, to the resolution of waging war ; and they were joined by the Boeotians and Chalcidians, the latter of whom may have feared for their newly re- covered freedom. These transactions are, however, very obscure. The JEtolians did not take part with them, perhaps from revenge and a malignant joy at seeing the downfall of their rivals. Critolaus led a small army to Thessaly, in all likelihood with the hope that the false Philip would still be able to hold out, and that the Romans would thus be placed be- tween two fires : for it was thought that the Macedoni- ans would go on with the war, and that the Thessalians perhaps would rise in a body. But in Macedon all was over. Heraclea, which before had sided with the Achaeans, was in fact separated from them by the Ro- mans : an Achaean detachment, which had already penetrated through Thermopylae, and was besieging Heraclea, quickly fled at the approach of Metellus and the Romans to the main army, and joined Critolaus, who had not yet reached Thermopylae. Experience indeed had shown that this pass could be turned ; yet the very place ought surely to have called upon the Greeks to die a glorious death : but they did the very /Cvv^ worst thing that they could have done ; for they made ) off in all haste for the Isthmus, and when near Scar- phea,* Metellus came up with their rear-guard, being » Thonium in Locris 1829, probably a laptui linguce,— Germ. Ed. , 254 THE ACHAEAN WAR. seized by a sudden panic, they were scattered like chaff before the wind. Critolaus disappeared : the most likely supposition is that he sank with his horse in the marshes on the sea-shore, though it is possible that they who told this, may also have meant by this myste- rious account to designate him as the evil genius of Greece. The Romans now entered Boeotia, and fell in at Chaeronea with the Arcadian contingent of one thou- sand men, which, at the tidings of the battle, was try- ing to retreat. The misery of Greece is described by Polybius, and we then see how unjust it was to this great man to have looked upon him as having no feel- ing for the fate of his native country. Metellus ad- vanced towards the Isthmus. The whole population of Thebes had left it, and had fled for refuge to Cithseron and Helicon ; Metellus took the town, and treated it with much forbearance : he wished to end the war, and to deal mildly with the Greeks. But that he could not do ; for which the Greeks themselves, as well as their stars, are to be blamed. In almost all the towns it was the same as in Thebes ; no one thought of making a stand. At the same time, a Roman fleet went to Pelo- ponnesus, and, landing on the coast of Elis, barbarously ravaged the country, the Achaeans not being able any- where to protect their shores : the contingent belong- ing to those parts did not now go to the Isthmus ; it tried to defend its own towns, but in vain. Diaeus, who, on the death of Critolaus, had seized upon the office of strategus, and had posted himself near Megara, at the approach of Metellus, retreated to the Isthmus. Now indeed the Achseans might have made peace ; for Metellus was a great soul, and had the safety of Greece at heart. He offered to negotiate ; but Diaeus, whose faction had the upperhand at Corinth, thought that he was able to maintain the Isthmus : reckless as he was, he scouted every proffer like a madman. How lucky it would have been if, like Papius Brutulus, he had thought of opening, by his own death, to his country, DESTRUCTION OF CORINTH. 255 the prospect of tranquillity ! It would then have been an easy thing for the Achaeans to have gotten a peace, in which the existence of the single states would have been maintained. Before Metellus reached the Isthmus, Mummius has- tened to take the command of the army. Mummius was not of so mild a disposition as Metellus ; he sought laurels for himself, and booty for the Romans. He tried to come up before Metellus could have concluded a peace : for the latter, although a plebeian like Mum- mius, was of a family which had long been in possession of the curule dignities, and being a nob His, he could easily have carried the peace in the senate ; Mummius was a novus homo, and not one of the aristocracy. Diaous had enlisted all the slaves who were able to bear arms, and yet he had only got together an army of fourteen thousand men, though there had been more than half a century of peace : this, more than anything, shows in what a wretched moral and political condition the country was ; for wealthy the Achaeans undoubtedly were. These had their heads turned by an advantage which they won in a cavalry fight, and they provoked the Romans to a battle, which was soon so utterly lost as to leave no hope of safety. They ought to have de- fended the impregnable Acrocorinthus ; but the whole population of Corinth fled into the Arcadian mountains, and the town and the citadel were abandoned, not a soul having remained behind. On the third day after the battle, Mummius, who would not believe it possible that they had given up every thought of defence, or- dered the gates to be broken open, and convinced him- self that the city was deserted. The pillage of Corinth ; Mummius' barbarian honesty ; and the burning of the most wealthy commercial town then in Europe, are well known facts. The booty was immense: all the Corinthians were sold for slaves, and the most noble works of art were carried away. In the same manner, Thebes and Chalcis were destroyed: with regard to 256 DESTRUCTION OF CORINTH. other towns, we have no distinct information. Thebes, in Pausanias' times, was only a small village within the Cadmea. The inhabitants of the whole of the Pelopon- nesus would have been sold into slavery, had not Poly- bius, through his friend Scipio, managed to get some merciful decrees from the senate. Greece was changed into a Roman province, a few places only, like Sparta and Athens, remaining liberce civitates: the real province was Achaia, the praetor of which had the other Greek districts under his rule as dependencies. Phocis and Bceotia were to pay tri- bute, a thing which they had never done even in the days of the Macedonian sway. Moreover, they got a uniform constitution, which Polybius had a hand in bringing about, and which is said to have contributed greatly towards the reviving of the country. But the national strength was paralysed by the law, that no one should possess landed property in a state to which he did not politically belong ; all the ava-rvspa.™ of the peoples were done away with; all concilia, and most likely, all connubia and commercia were forbidden : the territory of Corinth was added to the ager publicm. Polybius now returned to the land of his fathers, to obtain for his unhappy countrymen as fair conditions as he could. But his lot was that of a physician who performs on his wife or his child the most painful and dangerous cure : it is his love which animates him in his task ; and yet it is that very love which, in such an operation, rends his heart with thrice the agony that it does that of others. This courage is more than hero- ism : to bear up under such a trial, where once he had lived happily ; not to despair amid the general dismay, and even then only to get the tyrants to keep within bounds ; and after all to attain at last to a certain end, truly be- speaks a great soul. The author of a petulant essay on Polybius which was published a few years ago, has only exposed himself by his incapability of understanding the sterling greatness of the man. It was through Poly- WARS IN SPAIN. 257 bius that the statue of Philopcemen was restored ; and all the concessions which were at all favourable to Greece, were owing to nothing but his endeavours alone. WARS IN SPAIN. VIRIATHUS. DESTRUCTION OF NUMANTIA. Ix Spain, fortune was so far from smiling on the Ro- mans, that it seemed as if fate wished to remind them of a Nemesis, as the slave did the warrior in his triumph. The Spanish wars may be divided into periods. The first goes down to the end of the second Punic war ; the second, to the treaty of Gracchus by which the T^'*^ Romans ruled over Catalonia, Valencia, Andalusia, as well as western Aragon and eastern Castile, and also acquired a kind of supremacy over the Celtiberians. The violation of this peace by the fortification of Segi- da, called forth a fresh struggle which we may name as the first Celtiberian war : M. Claudius Marcellus had then the command ; it lasted three or four years. Out of the war against the Lusitanians, in which Galba by his faithlessness had branded the Roman name with dishonour, that of Viriathus sprang. This man, who was a Lusitanian, had been a common shep- / herd and also a robber, as is very often the case with ^ herdsmen in southern Europe, even as it is to this very M-tA^Ji^ day in Italy ; and having been among those Lusitanians towards whom Galba had behaved with such infamous treachery, he had vowed implacable revenge against the Romans. He placed himself at the head of a small band ; for in Spain it is characteristic of the nation to have a continual guerilla warfare, for which the Spa- niards have a turn, owing to the nature of their coun- try, and also from their disposition, law and order not having the least power over them, while personal quali- ties are everything. Viriathus enjoyed unbounded con- II. B 258 VIRIATHUS. fidence as the hero of the nation. He seldom engaged with the Romans in a pitched battle ; but to lie in am- bush, to cut off supplies, to go round the enemy, to scatter quickly after a defeat, were the ways in which he would wage war. By his great skill he wore out the Roman generals, more than one of whom lost his life against him. The history of his achievements, imperfect- ly as we know it, is exceedingly interesting. For eight years* (605-612), he maintained himself against the Ro- mans ; they would march against him with a superior force, and yet he always got out of their reach, and then would suddenly show himself in their rear, or hem them in on impassable roads, and rob them of their bag- gage, and cut them to pieces in detail. By these means, he gained the whole of the country for himself; only the inhabitants of the coast of Andalusia, who had ever been the least warlike, remained subject to the Romans, being quickly latinized. Among these, there- fore, Viriathus made his appearance as a foe ; but the ground which was particularly friendly to him, lay from Portugal, all through Estremadura, as far as Aragon : here he moved remarkably quickly with his light horse and foot. Seldom did he meet with loss against the Romans. The Celtiberians also he managed to win over to his side : they did not indeed carry on their warfare according to his plan, but still, as is always the case with Spaniards, they sought the same end in a way of their own. The Romans saw themselves reduced to the necessity of concluding with him a formal peace, in which they acknowledge him as socius and amicus po- puli Romani cequissimo jure, and by which he and his people became completely sovereign, — a peace the like of which the Romans had hardly ever made before. On his side it was honestly meant ; whereas the Romans, on the contrary, did not deem themselves bound to keep * If in the Epitome of T.ivy the time of his war is stated as being four- teen years, one is to aid the former war, in which he already distin- guished himself in a separate command among the Lusitauians. VIRIATHUS. 259 a treaty which was so utterly at variance with their maxims. The Roman pro -consul Caepio wished for a triumph and booty, like all the Roman generals of that time ; and so he rekindled the war, having with an ut- ter want of faith been authorized by the senate to do harm to Viriathus, wherever it was in his power. Thus the war broke out anew, though negotiations were seem- ingly going on. Traitors were found who offered to murder Viriathus : they accomplished the deed in his tent, and, before any body was aware of his death, es- caped to the Romans, from whom they received the price of blood. All that the Lusitanians could now do, was to bury him with an enthusiasm which has become fa- mous in history (612) : the friends of this great man fought with each other over his grave, until they fell. Treachery like this is often met with among the Ibe- rians : — the Celtiberians, however, are to be excepted. The character of the Spaniards has in many points re- mained entirely the same ; and though we must lay not a few such cases to the charge of that fearful party-spi- rit of theirs, which still displays itself as strong as ever, of them most particularly the saying holds good, that friendship dies, but that hatred is immortal. Another characteristic has continued to distinguish them even to this day : they are hardly fit for any thing in the lines, and they have shown themselves great in battles only at times, and under great generals, — under Hamilcar and Hannibal, in ancient history ; in the middle ages and afterwards, under Gonsalvo de Cordova who form- ed the Spanish infantry, down to the duke of Alva, under whom it still was excellent : from thence it began to decline.* The Lusitanians now went on with the war under several other generals; but none of the successors of Viriathus was as great as he was, — there was not the same confidence in their personal qualities. D. Junius * See abo^e, p. 60. 2 GO WARS IN SPAIN. Brutus Callaicus concluded a peace with them, and they accepted the offer of settling as a sort of Roman colony in Valencia, where they founded the town of that name : the climate there is most softening, so that they soon lost their warlike character. It is remarkable with what ease the same Brutus made conquests in the north- west of Spain, and the north-east of Portugal ; and also in modern times, these peoples have shown little perse- verance, except against the Moorish rule. He is the first Roman who advanced beyond the Minho into the country of the Callascians ; but his campaign did not leave any lasting consequences, although it made a deep impression in those parts. These conquests, which shed such lustre upon Rome, took place at the very time when the wars with the Celtiberians were carrying on so unsuccessfully. This people was divided in several small tribes, of which the Belli, Titthi, and Arevaci were the chief. Of their con- stitution we have no satisfactory idea. Southern Spain seems to have been ruled by kings; the Celtiberians were republican, and perhaps had highly popular insti- tutions : besides which, as in Greece, the most impor- tant towns had a free and independent existence of their own, Termantia or Termestia, and Numantia be- ing in the first rank among those of the Arevaci. The Celtiberian wars began in 609, and ended in 619 or 620 : when we bear in mind what the races were which held out in them, their great length is well nigh inconceiv- able. At first, most of the Celtiberians were under arms ; little by little, one place after the other fell off. Numantia lay in a very strong position, amid ravines and torrents, near the spot where Soria now stands : whether it is true that it had no walls, or whether this be only said in imitation of the accounts of Sparta, can no longer be made out. They were ;.ble to send but eight thousand men into the field, a number which was great- ly lessened in the course of the war : at the time of the blockade, there were not more than four thousand left DESTRUCTION OF NUMANTIA. 261 Twice the Romans make a peace with them, and twice did they break it again : at last, Scipio was once more charged with the commission of torturing to death a noble people. The year 611 was that of the consulship of Q. Pom- peius, who, to distinguish him from another of the same name, is called Auli jttius: he was appointed to the command in Spain. He is the ancestor of Cn. Pom- peius Magnus, who stood at the head of the aristocracy of his day, and he himself figured as one of the leaders of that class, although the son of a very humble musi- cian. As he leagued himself with the nobiles, he was welcome to them, and was received into their ranks ; so that even before he was consul, he had already a powerful party. How he raised himself, is uncertain : according to some, he did it by dishonourable means ; yet he was a man of talent. His very opposite was Tib. Sempronius Gracchus, who was of a plebeian house, but of most ancient nobility : the latter was at the head of the popular party. Q. Pompeius led his army against the Numantines, and was unsuccessful : they took his camp, and brought him to very great straits. Being in this plight, he offered peace : the Numantines, but only for form's sake, were to give hostages, whom he was to re- turn to them ; they were also to pay a certain sum, and to promise to serve in the field. This they also did. But this most reasonable peace did not please at Rome, nor was Pompeius fool enough to believe that it would ; his successor, by order of the senate, disregarded it alto- gether. The Numantines sent ambassadors to Rome, and appealed to the treaties, in which they were borne out by the Roman staff-officers : but the senate annulled the peace, Pompeius himself doing his utmost to bring this about, that he might not be called to account for the way in which he had conducted the war. Hostili- ties were renewed on a greater scale ; and a few years afterwards the command fell to C. Hostilius Mancinus, a man who had the ill luck to gain a great celebrity 262 DESTRUCTION OF NUMANTIA. and a sort of moral notoriety which indeed is of a very doubtful nature. The frightened Spaniards had aban- doned Numantia to its fate, and Mancinus had reached as far as the suburbcma, the gardens and cemeteries of the town : there he was driven back in an engagement ; the Numantines pursued, and the Romans, retreating in blind haste, got into a place from which there was no way out, so that they had to make up their minds either to sue for peace or perish. At first, the Numan- tines would have nothing to say to the conditions of- fered by Mancinus, favourable as they were ; it was only Tib. Gracchus, then serving as a quaestor, who could save the army. The Numantines had not for- gotten the equitable peace which his father had made, but the remembrance of his upright conduct towards all the Celtiberians was so dear to them, that they ac- cepted the son as a mediator, being convinced that he meant honestly. So great was the respect in which he was held by them, that he betook himself in the midst of them to Numantia, to get back his account-books, which, as well as the camp, had fallen into their hands ; and these were also returned to him uninjured. The army, which, without reckoning the allies, numbered twenty thousand men, was allowed to march off without disgrace, and independence and friendship were stipu- lated for Numantia. Mancinus afterwards played at Rome the same part which Sp. Postumius had done after the Caudine peace : he recommended the senate to yield up himself and the officers, to atone for the un- authorized peace. The people agreed to this, so far as he was concerned ; but it threw out the clause as to the officers, out of regard for Tib. Gracchus. Man- cinus was delivered up : the noble-minded Numantines would not have him, that the curse of a broken oath might fall upon those who were guilty. The war lasted yet a few years longer without any result ; so that the Romans were driven, in spite of the laws, (as Appian says,) to elect Scipio Africanus con- DESTRUCTION OF NUAIANTIA. 263 sul. Ten years had already passed away since his first consulship, and the leges annales could not have pre- scribed an age which he had not reached already ; per- haps there was a law that no one should be consul twice. Scipio went forth with many recruits, allies, and volunteers from all parts, with Numidians and men from the far East, against that small people, to root it out from the earth. All the proffers of the Numantines were rejected. Scipio found a great degeneracy in the Roman troops ; and it cost him a vast deal of trouble to restore discipline, as the loose morals and the lux- ury which were rife among individuals, were likewise spreading in the army : he purified it, and then march- ed with sixty thousand men against Numantia. This city was surrounded on three sides by the Douro, and it lay therefore on an isthmus, which was strongly for- tified. Around the town, the circumference not being more than three Roman miles, (one German,) Scipio now drew a line of pallisades with a rampart, and be- hind it a second one, — just as Platasae was shut in by the Spartans, — and here he distributed his army. On these lines, he placed engines for hurling missiles, with which the Romans tried to keep off their desperate foes, as they wanted to destroy them by hunger. For a while, some of them escaped on the Douro, by which the besieged also got supplies ; but he cut them off even from this, by sinking above the town huge beams armed with saws into the river, so that the rafts with flour could no longer float down that way. How long this dreadful blockade lasted, is more than we can tell. Once, however, some Numantines climbed over the walls, and came to a distant town where some hundred youths enthusiastically took up arms ; and thus a gene- ral rising against the Romans was on the eve of burst- ing forth. When Scipio found this out, he forthwith marched thither, and had the hands of those who were guilty cut off. Such an atrocity stamps the man. The Numantines, when they had fed, first on the dead bodies of 264- THE SERVILE WAR IN SICILY. the enemy, and then on those of their own countryman, and gone through all those horrors which Missolunghi had to suffer, wished at length to capitulate. Scipio demanded that their arms should be given up, and that they should surrender at discretion: they asked for three days, which they spent in freeing their wives and children by death from slavery ; so that a few of them only came out, who were like skeletons. Of these, Scipio picked out fifty for his triumph, who seem to have been beheaded afterwards : the rest were sold ; but they are said to have broken out with such rage, some of them killing themselves, and others murdering their masters, that after a short time not a Numantine was left alive. The place where the town had stood, from henceforth became a waste. THE SERVILE WAR IN SICILY. ACQUISITION OF THE KING- DOM OF PERGAMUS. ARISTONICUS. DOMESTIC AFFAIRS. THE punishment for so foul a deed was not slow in overtaking the Romans. Even before the fall of Nu- mantia, a servile war broke out in Sicily ; though in- deed this does not so much belong to Roman, as to Grecian history. It was brought on by the depopula- tion of the island owing to the many wars in which fa- mine and pestilence were raging, as in Germany during the Thirty Years' war. Twenty-four years had not yet passed since the first Punic war, when the second com- pleted the misery of Sicily : it was in a state of desola- tion, like that of Ireland after the peace of Limerick, in the times of William III. Much of the land was madeayer piMicus, and thus fell into the hands of speculators ; in this way there arose large estates in Sicily, which were chiefly used for grazing. Thus (according to the Codex Theodosianus) nearly the whole of Lucania, Bruttium, and Calabria, in the days of Honorius and Arcadius, THE SERVILE WAR IN SICILY. 265 was pasture land, of which the owners, who were partly Romans, partly Siciliotes, kept large studs of horses and herds of cattle. Herdsmen in Italy are a degene- rate race of men : they are, almost all of them, as far as I know, (in the States of the Church and in the king- dom of Naples, — in Tuscany there are few of them,) the associates of robbers : the herdsman is as bad and as robber-like, as the peasant, on the other hand, is re- spectable. On these large estates, there was an immense number of slaves, — often as many as thousands toge- ther on one alone. The traffic in slaves, owing to the wars and the continual piracy of those times, had reached a fearful height ; so that at the slave-market in Delos, ten thousand are said to have been sold in one day, and they were to be had for a mere trifle. They were treat- ed with the greatest cruelty, and had to work in the fields in chains ; of course, there were among them many respectable men from all parts, Carthaginians, Achaeans, Macedonians, Celtiberians, and others, who deserved quite a different fate, and could not but thirst for the blood of their tyrants. Thus the Servile war broke out in Sicily, and it is not to be wondered at that there was then another of these risings in Greece : the cause was everywhere the same. In Greece, tillage had formerly been mostly the business of the freedmen, and it was only of late that it had fallen into the hands of the slaves. The war had now reached its fourth year ; several Ro- man armies had been utterly routed, and it required a consular one under P. Rupilius to reduce the island (620) : for the slaves were masters of the strongest places, Enna and Tauromenium, and they had for their leader Eunus (Eivot/?), a Syrian, who, like Jean Francois at St. Domingo in the year 1791, put on the diadem in due form. The struggle was carried on with the same re- lentless cruelty which slaves have met with everywhere, as in the West Indies and in North America. Sicily was laid utterly waste by it, and thirty years afterwards, the same circumstances led to the same results. The de- 2G6 ACQUISITION OF PERGAMUS. tails are awfully interesting ; yet, as we have said be- fore, they are not in their place here. In the meanwhile, Attains Philometor of Pergamus, the son of Eumenes, died, and with him the race of Philetaerus became extinct. The first kings of Perga- mus whom the Romans had raised to greatness, were on the whole clever men and mild princes ; and under their rule the country nourished : this state of things was a desirable one, although, if looked upon in a moral point of view, much might be said against it. But the last Attalus was a tyrant and a wicked wretch, such as is only to be met with in the East, where a certain per- versity reaches its highest pitch, and takes delight in what is most unnatural and revolting : in a word, he was an incarnate fiend, like Sultan Ibrahim. The only art in which he employed himself, was that of cultivat- ing deadly plants and of preparing poison : it was sport to him, to get those who were his nearest kindred out of the world. He bequeathed the whole of his kingdom to the Romans ; and indeed he could not well have done otherwise, as every one of his dispositions had still to be approved of by the Romans, who would hardly have ac- knowledged the rule of any one else. They took it as a property which of right belonged to them, very much as a master might take the goods of one of his freedmen who had not been fully emancipated, and had died with- out leaving a will. Thus Rome had a new province, which, however, was to be won by the sword, as Aris- tonicus, a bastard son of Eumenes, laid claim to the throne. According to the notions of the East, this de- fect of birth was not a bar to the succession, so that, but for the will of Attalus, he would have been the lawful heir. He had very little trouble in getting hold of the diadem soon after the death of his brother ; for the peo- ple had a horror of the Roman rule, and they had learn- ed to know the tyranny and rapacity of the Roman praetors and proconsuls who made their appearance every year : many towns declared for him ; others, like ARISTONICFS. 267 Ephesus, which had lately gained their freedom by the help of Rome, took up arms Against him. How he came to believe that he could hold out, is quite inconceivable. He had no aid whatever : in his neighbourhood were Pontus, Cappadocia, and Bithynia, all three of which were only small kingdoms, and the two last quite un- wai'like ; the Syrian kings were likewise tottering to their fall, and their whole attention was turned to the East, where the Parthian empire was spreading farther and farther, and Babylon was already conquered. There was not a soul in the world who could help Andronicus ; and yet he would engage in the mad undertaking of raising war against the Romans. But the struggle last- ed longer than one would have thought : not only did the womanish inhabitants of Lydia and Ionia, countries which are an earthly paradise, carry it on with great resolution, but the pretender had likewise many Thra- cians in his pay. The Romans, on the other hand, were badly commanded: their leaders thought of nothing but enriching themselves ; they were very glad when wealthy towns rebelled, as they could then plunder them. Rome had not only a consular army, but also troopa from Bithynia and Pontus ; a Roman general, P. Lici- nius Crassus, was even defeated and taken prisoner. This man has some name in history ; and yet, his rapa- city was so abominable, that the Asiatics ill-treated his dead body because of it : so cheap was it at that time to be deemed a man of honour. He died, however, a noble death, himself asking to be killed. At length, M. Perperna overcame Aristonicus, and took him prisoner ; but M. Aquillius snatched the triumph from him. This is of later date than the tribuneship of Tib. Gracchus (619) ; that is to say, in 622.* The province of Asia was now regularly formed, but within narrower limits. Rome was generous to the na- tive princes : Nicomedes had his territory enlarged, and » Zumpt's annals are very recommendable in their way. 268 DOMESTIC AFFAIRS. Great Phrygia was given to Mithridates of Pontus. But in the latter case, this was not done before the tribune- ship of C. Gracchus, who, however, seems to have spo- ken against it, Mithridates having perhaps gotten this quite unnecessary cession of land by bribing the Roman commissioners. The changes in the constitution of Rome in those days, are most of them unimportant, as the distinction between patrician and plebeian was now at an end. In 622, for the first time, two plebeians are censors; in 580 already, both the consuls were from the same order. Here we find this entry in the Capitoline Fasti, anibo primi de plebe: Livy makes no remark whatever about it, circumstances having become so ripe for the change, that no one even thought any longer of putting any ob- stacle in the way of a plebeian. Dionysius says, that in his time not more than fifty patrician families were still left, which is to be understood of actual families, and not of gentes, of which there may have been only about fifteen. As gentes, they are no longer held in any ac- count : these had lost their importance together with the curies. In a gens, moreover, all the families were not ennobled : of the Claudia, there was only one ; of the Valeria, the Messalae ; the Cornelia consisted of Sci- piones, Lentuli, Cethegi, Sullse (these last being added but of late) ; in the ^Emilia, were the Lepidi, and per- haps also the Scauri. But of the plebeian families no- biles there was a very great number, and they were still ever increasing. Of the senate, by far the larger part belonged to them ; ever since the end of the war with Hannibal, most of the praetors were likewise plebeians, scarcely one out of six being a patrician : nor does it seem as if any stress had been laid on it ; it was merely the effect of time. In the troubles of the Gracchi, we find the families quite indiscriminately in both parties. Appius Claudius, sprung from a family which in former times had headed the patricians against the plebeians, was the father-in-law of Tib. Gracchus, and sided with him, and DOMESTIC AFFAIRS. 269 carried through all the laws put forth by him ; whilst, on the other hand, those, who were the most enraged against the Gracchi, and the most interested in with- standing them, were, with the exception of Scipio Nasica, all of them plebeians. The feuds had long been settled, and they had passed to the novi homines and nobiles, the latter of whom were in the last century very incor- rectly called patricians, especially by foreigners (the French). This change has 'been known ever since the revival of learning. The censorship remained forty years longer than the consulship in the possession of the pa- tricians ; for as the elections for this were only every five years, there were still men enough to fill it. About the same time, the holding the sedileship by turns must have been done away with ; and certainly this office must of late have been a heavy burthen upon the patricians, as it entailed considerable expense. The tribuneship of the people had quite changed character; the tribune holding arbitrary sway just like any tyrant. A tribune (C. Atinius Labeo), a few years after Gracchus, wanted to have the censor Metellus thrown from the Tarpeian rock for having excluded him from the senate ; and it was only with difficulty that his family succeeded in getting another tribune to in- tercede for him. Such instances are not unseldom met with, as the tribunes themselves no longer knew what their office meant. It was very likely the same Ati- nius, who brought in the law that the tribunes were eo ipso senators, and could only be excluded by the same rules as other senators. TIBERIUS SEMPROJflUS GRACCHUS. THERE was a time when the name of the Gracchi was cried down, when they were looked upon as the leaders of a tyrannical onslaught upon the property of others ; 270 TIBERIUS SEMPEONIUS GRACCHUS. and there was another time, when they had a renown which would have certainly been most hateful to them- selves. Both of these opinions are now entirely explod- ed ; and, although the complicated system of the ager publicus is not yet understood everywhere, still I do not believe that any one in Germany — -unless indeed it be in some corner of Austria — holds the old views with re- gard to the Gracchi. The French still cling a little to their false prejudices ; but in America my account of the matter is already the one generally received, as a reviewer of my history in a North American periodical has especially pointed out. Tiberius Gracchus was the son of Tiberius Gracchus the elder who had made the peace with the Celtiberians, and of Cornelia, the daughter of the first Scipio Afri- canus, who was given in marriage to her husband, not, as Livy says, by her father, but, after his death, by her family: both of these were, even in the midst of the thorough corruption of that age, acknowledged to have been people of the highest virtue, in whom the olden times were living again. Of their many children, few only remained alive — in fact, out of twelve not more than three, namely the two brothers, Tiberius and Caius, and the daughter, who was married to the younger Scipio (Paulli fil.). The sons were brought up under the eye of the mother by distinguished Greeks, and by a Campanian, C. Blossius, who was a perfect Grecian, writing Greek, and even composing poetry in Greek : he was, as we now know, the author of Rhintonian comedies,* a proof of the nourishing state of Greek literature at that time in Italy, of which Cicero also informs us. He was the teacher and friend of Tiberius of whom he was somewhat the elder, and a follower of Stoic philosophy, a system which in those days was congenial to the aspirations of all generous * I know of no passage where this is stated. May this not perhaps have been a mistake for Blasts, who has written Rhintonian pieces • —Germ. Edit. TIBERIUS SEAIPRONIUS GRACCHUS. 2 71 minds, and was particularly welcome to a nation like the Romans. When Tiberius, owing to the great favour which he had with the people, had been raised step by step to honours, and he had gained glory already at Carthage, where with C. Fannius he was the first to mount the wall, he became a quaestor and made the peace with Numantia. Its not being ratified greatly exasperated him. Unfortunately, we have for this period only desultory works from second or third hand, such as those of Appian and Plutarch: the latter of these wrote the lives of the Gracchi with much feeling, but without any knowledge of the true state of affairs, the moral part in him, being, however, really beautiful ; moreover, like Appian, he is led astray by the gossip of any writer. Thus Plutarch allows himself to be be- guiled into the belief that the vanity of Tiberius had been hurt by the repudiation of the peace ; but of a soul such as that of Tiberius, we may safely say that its mo- tives for anger were different. He had concluded the peace as an honest man, and to see it trampled upon in defiance of all good faith, embittered him against the men who then were in power. How a character like Gracchus in such times as those must have felt bound to take in hand these dangerous Tro^n-ev^xr*, may best be shown from the Servile war in Sicily, where the real canker which lay at the root of the whole state of society is laid bare. The agerputticus* was the land taken in war, of which the ownership belonged to the commonwealth, but the possession was given up to Roman citizens, or to foreigners, on the payment of certain outgoings, such as the tithes on the produce of the arable land and of the live stock ; a scriptura on the pasture land according to the num- ber of the cattle ; and other things of the kind. By the Licinian lawt it had been enacted that no one should possess more than five hundred jugera of the ager * See vol. I, p. 251. t Ibid. p. 398. 272 TIBERIUS SEMPRONIUS GRACCHUS. publicus, but that he might transfer the occupancy as if it were his property : yet the possessor was, after all, only a precarious occupant, a tenant at will,* whom the real owner might turn out, whenever he liked. If he possessed more than was allowed by law, he was liable to punishment, and what was above the quantity was to be confiscated : the state, however, might, of course, at any time take back the whole. The way in which the Licinian law was kept, was just what might be expected under such circumstances : one or two incidents give us light enough to see this. P. Postumius Megillus, for instance, was fined for hav- ing employed the soldiers of the legion in converting a large forest into arable land ; Licinius Stole himself was accused of having tried by emancipating his son to evade his own law, as under his name he held more than its clauses would have allowed him. The amount of land was everywhere exceeded; and the very fact of these estates being no freeholds, as they had the autho- rity of the prastor for their only title, so that, where they were situated, there existed no jurisdiction, gave to those who wished to enrich themselves a great means of driving out the small farmers, which was now done more and more. Whilst in Germany, as well as in France and in England, the small estates are worth much more taken singly, than when combined in large masses ; in the South, particularly in Italy, the larger properties are more profitable, and thus the small estates go on decaying, and all the land keeps falling into the hands of a few owners. Until the war with Pyrrhus, an im- mense deal of land had been won, and so likewise after the war with Hannibal: part of it was taken up for colonies, and another share was left to the Latin allies, whose claims were thereby satisfied, though even in this case also, the right of ownership seems to have been reserved to the Roman commonwealth. Only in Sam- TIBERIUS SEMPRONIUS GRACCHUS. 273 mum and Apulia, and I believe also in Lucania,* had an extraordinary distribution been made to the veterans of Scipio's army ; but besides this, no general assign- ment had been made to the plebeians viritim, as in olden times. It is in the nature of things, that the husbandman is able to pay a far higher rent for a piece of land, than we could, who do not till it ourselves, provided, how- ever, that no capital is needed for it. We have to pay the labourer, whereas the other gets the double gain of the labourer and of the farmer. I know the farming in Italy well, having taken much trouble to become ac- quainted with all kinds of land-owners and farmers there, particularly with the larger ones, who understand husbandry very well. The latter manage their farms in an excellent style, and yet they are a curse to the coun- try : on the other hand, I quite love the poor peasants. Among others, I knew of a small farmer at Tivoli, who did his very utmost to get himself out of the clutches of the usurers, and to free his bit of ground ; on which oc- casion I fully learnt how great the value of labour is in Italy, and what an advantage it is there for a man to farm his own land. But as the money is in very few hands, only indeed in those of the men of rank, the small proprietor, if any ill luck befalls him, is unable to keep his freehold u and therefore this class of men dwindles faster and faster every year. The poor man, for instance, livj|ir-near the rich one; the former in hard times had taxes to pay, but, having had losses owing to murrain among the cattle and other visita- tions, he could not raise the money : thus he borrowed from his wealthy neighbour, and as he had no other pledge to offer but his farm, he had to pay a heavy rate of interest. Nor was this the whole of his troubles : his son, perhaps, served in a legion, in which case, if the father was taken ill and had to keep labourers, he could * In Liv. XXXI, 4. Lucania is not mentioned. — Germ. Edit. ir. a 274 TIBERIUS SEMPRONIUS GRACCHUS. not pay the interest ; and now, if his neighbour called upon him for the principal and interest, he must needs give up to him the possession of his land at a low price. He who is once in the fangs of the large proprietors, will never get out again. And so Tib. Gracchus found the many small allotments on which the soldiers had settled, either burthened with debt after the long series of disasters during the late campaigns (in which the war-taxes moreover were most heavily felt), or already fallen into the hands of the rich. Such a change of pro- perty goes on increasing like an avalanche. In Tivoli, the number of land-owners is now perhaps not a fifth of what it was forty years back, and not one-fiftieth of what it was four hundred years ago ; as I have learned from an old survey of the fifteenth century. I made inquiries to know what became of many of the olive- yards there, which (in former times) belonged to certain families in the town, and one by one have been got hold of by the rich. Sonnino* has four thousand inhabi- tants, and some five or six men own the whole of the land : all the rest are beggars and robbers. By the Licinian law it was enacted, that on every five hundred jugera, a certain number of free labourers (cot- tagers) t should be employed, that slaves might not work on them. But the rule had not been kept : thousands of slaves came in, as was also the case in Portugal from the sixteenth century to Pombal's days, when negro slaves were so very cheap within the kingdom, owing to which indeed so many mulattoes are found there. The condition of Italy was now this : on the one hand, the number of Roman citizens had increased, partly — which was desirable — from the allies, but chiefly in a worse way from the freedmen, the common run of whom bore the brand of slavery ; and on the other hand, the numbers of the hereditary land-holders and land-owners were dwindling * I have supplied this name merely from conjecture: the MSS. have Solino, a place which I do not nnd.-^-Germ. Ed. f This English word is in the original. TIBERIUS SEMPRONIUS GRACCHUS. 275 fast. It is very likely that the first thought of amend- ing this state of things, came into the mind of Tib. Gracchus on his return from Spain through Etruria, where he saw large tracts of country with nothing but slaves, who worked at the ground in chains, while the free-born men were begging and starving. The popu- lation of Rome" had become more and more a true rab- ble, and in the country the poor increased at a fearful rate, an evil which alas ! is now a growing one in Europe. The Romans did not blind themselves to the condition in which they were ; they mourned over it, and acknow- ledged that, if the Licinian law had been observed and the poor had been allowed to occupy the land, there never would have been that wretchedness. Every body wished, like the king* in Goethe's play, that " all were otherwise ; " but no one had the courage to do anything. There is no doubt that just after the war with Hannibal, it would not have been hard to stop the mischief, and that was one of those momentous periods which some- times follow after great convulsions, and must be taken ad- vantage of, or else they are irrecoverably lost : one ought then to have created a magistracy to watch over the way in which the Licinian law was kept, and to distri- bute part of the conquered ager pullicus, and to see that the occupation was fairly managed. Since that time, seventy years had passed, and every one must have looked blank at the very mention of a reform. C. Lae- lius is said to have thought of it, but to have given up the plan as impracticable ; so that he got the surname of Sapiens. This was either a nickname, or else sapie'/is here means prudent ; for prudent it is not to stir up a wasp's nest. There were now but few great families indeed which did not possess far more than the lawful quantity, and which did not keep more than a hundred head of cattle, and five hundred sheep and goats, upon * A mistake, very likely from misreading the academical shorthand of the MSS. It should be, the queen, the quotation being from the mock tragedy " Esther" in the Jakrmarkt Zv. Plundtrswettern.— TJUNSL. 276 TIBERIUS SEMPRONIUS GRACCHUS. their estates : all these were sure to be offended, if the Licinian law were carried out in all its rigour. As our governments have now the right, when a lease is out, of warning off a tenant on the crown-land, although his forefathers held it perhaps for many years before him ; thus also the Roman government had never given up its right to the ager pvJblicus> although it had not exercised it for a long time. The law was quite clear ; yet as it had not been enforced for ages, it might be said on the other side, that it was only common equity not to root out an old abuse at once, and thus wound many interests. The rich might plead, that " when C. Flaminius made his agrarian law to apply to the new conquests only, he thereby tacitly acknowledged what had hitherto been held by right of possession ; moreover when the loan was contracted in the war with Hanni- bal the ager pvhlicus was pledged to us, and has thus become our property." A hundred years had already passed since then; some of the estates had also been laid waste during the war ; in the full trust that every one would remain in possession of what belonged to him, they had planted them anew,* they had raised buildings on them, they had drained fens : and now they were to sacrifice all this, and to be turned out of what was their own. Of purer intentions than Tiberius Gracchus, no man could ever have been : even they have owned it, who a long time after, blinded by party-spirit, have railed against this undertaking; nay, Cicero himself, whose generous heart always gets the better of him whenever he views a subject with unprejudiced eyes, calls him sanctis&iinus homo. The statesmen of old were not such as our fancy would generally lead us to paint them ; but they had the self-same ends in view as those of our times: Tiberius Gracchus saw clearly, that, if things * Olive plantations especially are only productive after a Ion? time, so that an ejectment renders entirely fruitless a very great amount of labour bestowed upon them. TIBERIUS SEMPRONIUS GRACCHUS. 277 were to go on in this way, utter ruin must follow, and Rome would fall into despotism. Had he now wished to enforce the Licinian rogations to the very letter, this would indeed have been just in law, but in reality most unfair. He therefore laid down the rule, that every one should be allowed to have, and that as freehold property, five hundred jugera for himself, and two hun- dred and fifty for every son who was still in patria po- testate, though as it seems, not for more than two of these (for so must the passage in the Epitome of Livy be interpreted according to the correct reading) ;* and moreover, that buildings erected on that part of the land which was to be given up, should be valued, and an indemnity paid to those who had owned them. Thus, instead of infringing upon vested rights, he, on the con- trary, converted a mere tenure at will into a regular freehold which no man could touch. One case, how- ever, Gracchus had not considered : many had bought the ager publicus of the former occupant for ready money, or had taken it at its value as their share of an inheritance ; these could not be expected to lose their capital. When this had happened, the overplus ought to have been bought in at a fair price by the state, and then there would have been nothing to say against the law : the great wealth of the state would have certainly sufficed for this, as there could not, after all, have been so many cases of people having more than a thousand jugera. Five hundred jugera are a very good-sized estate, as much as seventy rubbii are now, which is still looked upon as not a bad property in Italy. I should not in that country wish for a larger one : one may get from it in a fruitful district, if well managed, a net income of five thousand crowns, merely by letting it out in farms. That the money which was hoarded up in the treasury, could not have been better spent * For Niebuhr reads Liv. Epit. LVIII, n« quis ex fnMica agro pita quam M jngera possidfret. R. H. voL 11., p. 150. — Germ. Edit. 278 TIBERIUS SEMPRONIUS GRACCHUS. than for such a purpose, is as clear as day. In this way it might have become possible to remove from the city the sentina rei publics, the disgrace of the Roman peo- ple, which weighed like a heavy burthen upon it, and which always sold its votes in the comitia. To this class allotments ought to have been given, but with the condition that they should never be alienated, as otherwise they would have fallen again into the hands of the rich. It is ever to be lamented that Gracchus did not do this : however great the cost might have been, the state ought to have borne it. In all likelihood he would have escaped the fate which befell him, though indeed the hatred against him would always have been bitter. Gracchus is said also to have thought of widening the extent of the Roman franchise ; yet this is only dimly hinted at, as, generally speaking, the accounts which we have of the whole of his undertaking are so very scanty. He saw clearly that the middle class of the Roman peo- ple had almost entirely disappeared, and that its re- storation was one of the principal wants of the time ; and therefore he wished to open the citizenship to the allies. This regeneration is quite in the spirit of the old laws : its aim was to infuse fresh blood into the higher orders, and to enlarge their numbers; just as in former times the Licinian laws gave new life to the re- public which was dwindling to an oligarchy, and began the second brilliant epoch of Rome. There were in Italy thirty Latin colonies, and in these there were many citizens of great respectability, who might vote among the tribes in the Roman assemblies, and who felt second only to the Romans, if not quite their equals. These Latins actually now held the same rank which the ple- beians did two hundred and fifty years before : there was even much more refinement in those towns than in Rome. Tiberius Gracchus wished therefore to admit these to the full rights of Roman citizens, and he TIBERIUS SEMPRONIUS GRACCHUS. 279 likewise undoubtedly meant to grant the sufragium to any municipia sine suffragio which at that time may have still existed. On the side of Gracchus were many of the most emi- nent men, who certainly were owners of large estates as well as the Scipios, but who gave up their private advantage for the common good. There was even his father-in-law Appius Claudius, who in other respects was just as proud as any of his forefathers, but who in this behaved as Appius Claudius Caecus had done in his most glorious moments ; moreover, there was the great P. Mucius Scsevola who was then consul ; there was also the father-in-law of his brother, P. Licinius Crassus, and others. The rage which broke out against Tib. Gracchus in the senate, is difficult to describe ; it went beyond all the bounds of decency. Men of rank, when they are the champions of oligarchy, as soon as ever their interests are touched, not only display the same greedy covetousness as the worst bred, but likewise a fury which one could hardly have believed. Hitherto no one had lost sight of what was due to Gracchus and his family : he enjoyed the same respect among the Ro- mans, as among barbarians ; every one acknowledged his virtue, and even those who looked upon all virtue as folly, were forced to own that he was afflicted with that folly. But now the heroes of triumphs, and the first men of the state, railed against him as a mutinous fellow who was actuated by the most detestable motives. P. Cornelius Nasica, he who was grandson of him who in the war with Hannibal had been declared to be the most virtuous of men ; and son of Scipio Nasica, who was likewise said to have been an example to the whole nation, and who had tried hard to bring back the good ways of the olden time ; a man who himself also was deemed to be the very soul of honour, and perhaps deserved to be so in many respects — became hand and glove with the infamous Q. Pompeius. From this it does not follow that he was a knave ; it may be 280 TIBERIUS SEMPRONIUS GRACCHUS. that, hardened in his oligarchical notions, he really saw Ti. Gracchus as he fancied him to be. The senate did not possess the same means which the patricians once had against the plebeians : it had not the old negative of the curies, the Hortensian law having conceded to the tribes the most unbounded power of legislation, so that the senate could not step in with a senatus-con- sultum. By the strangest anomaly, the tribunes could now only check each other, since there was no veto where it would have been most needed : the only means of defeating a law was the intercession of a tribune. There are hereditary family principles in Rome, as there were also family characters ; and these are more than mere political maxims. * Throughout the family of the Gracchi, as has been already mentioned, we find a cer- tain mildness, and an unaffected kindliness towards those who were in need of help. This is shown in the three generations which are remarkable in history, by Tib. Gracchus in the Second Punic War, by Tib. Gracchus the censor, and by the two unfortunate brothers Tibe- rius and Caius ; it is a disposition moreover which in Rome was not often met with, and which had now dis- appeared entirely. The same thing is to be seen in every free state, and it is one of those spells by which a commonwealth is upheld. Those who are born in cer- tain families, are, as it were, predestined to such and such political principles : thus in England it is known at once to which party a Russel is sure to belong, just as every one receives from his church the doctrines which he is to follow, t If the notion that the tribunes belonged to a different class from the ruling one, is quite erroneous at the very outset, it is utterly groundless now. At this time, we may positively say that as a rule the tribunes — though TIBERIUS SEMPRONIUS GRACCHUS. 281 they did not all become consuls themselves, as every year there were ten tribunes elected, and not more than two consuls — belonged to the consular families, and that it was only very rarely that a plebeian was made consul who had not once been tribune. This is a point, which we must not lose sight of. It now happened not unseldom that a man like Gracchus was among the tribunes. M. Octavius, who was tribune with him, be- longed to a good family, although not one of the very first rank. Him the opposite party gained over, to put in his veto. There is nothing to say against his charac- ter : he had formerly been a friend of Tiberius Gracchus, but party spirit had now got the better of him. He himself had much to lose, and Gracchus offered to make it up to him out of his own property ; but this, of course, he could not accept. In vain did Gracchus try to convince him of his error, and adjure him to recal his intercession: it was all to no purpose, as Octavius had bound himself by his word of honour, and could not act otherwise than in the trammels of his faction, which is the worst thing that a man can do in a struggle of parties. The question now was, whether Gracchus should give up a law which might save the nation and check the spread of vice, merely because a man who was his friend had sold his soul to the evil faction ; or whether he should do a thing which was indeed contrary to the letter, but quite in the spi- ( rit of the constitution. He made up his mind to the latter course, which was to move in the assembly of the people, that Octavius should be put out of his tribune- ship. This was an irregularity ; but, properly speak- ing, the independence of the tribunes was an abuse: consuls had been deposed more than once, and an office from which its holder cannot be removed, is an abs_ur- dity in a republic. The tribunes were merely commis- sioned to bring motions before the people, and whoever has given a commission can also take it away again. But what Gracchus did, was wrong in point of form. 282 TIBERIUS SEMPRONIUS GRACCHUS. That he might swerve from the law as little as he could, he proposed to Octavius, first to put himself to the vote ; and when Octavius refused, he went on with his motion. Seventeen tribes had already voted against Octavius, when Gracchus once more besought him to give up his opposition, or else to resign. But he would do neither, and was deposed. As he wished to make a scene, he would not leave the rostra, until Gracchus had him dragged down by force, thus awakening that feeling of disgust among the beholders, which the senate and the men in power were eager to call forth. The opponents of Tib. Gracchus had now the advan- tage of seeing him wrong in form. The agrarian law was carried, and a standing triumvirate was appointed to watch over the way in which it was kept. Tib. Grac- chus, his brother, and his father-in-law, were named as triumvirs. From the Somnium Scipionis, we see that the socii and Latini attached themselves to P. Scipio, and we have even a great many statements which show that they, like the senate, were against the agrarian law : the reason for this we may make out by laying things together, there being several ways of accounting for it, one of which must undoubtedly be the true one. The Roman laws, unless it were expressly stipulated, did not apply to the allies, as we know from the usury laws, which are a case in point. Now it may be that the law of Licinius had said nothing about the socii and Latini; so that if these had a possessio, they were not tied down to the maximum of five hundred jugera. Those who were rich, may have bought up in remote districts the latifundia of former Roman posses- sors, and they would now have been disturbed by the Sempronian law. Certain it is, that the socii and La- tini had always been granted a certain portion of the offer publicus: thus for instance the Campanians had a very large one, which they could only have acquired as allies ; the Marsians had a share in the Apulian pas- tures. That Gracchus had meddled with these holdings, TIBERIUS SEMPRONIUS GRACCHUS. 283 is not very likely, though it cannot be positively de- nied. It is more probable, on the other hand, that many places had been allowed, till further orders, to have the use of their ager on condition of their paying tribute for it, though the right of ownership, which these had lost in war, had not been restored to them by the Roman people : if this indulgence were now taken away, it was hard upon them. They also got compensations, as we know for certain in the case of Carthage. Those who held on such tenures, had now the same interest as the wealthy Romans. However this may have been, the allies felt themselves aggrieved. — The plea then of de- fending the rights of the subjects, was the mask behind which the covetousness of those who were in power was hidden : they put on the guise of being the champions of these without thinking at all of themselves, an hy- pocrisy, which has taken in even a clear-headed man like Cicero, who is remarkably wavering with regard to these and other like transactions : his heart is with the Gracchi, but led by a priori reasoning, he decides against them ; and thus he feels quite at a loss, and is afraid to speak out. The circumstances under which he wrote the books de Be publica and de Legibus, are his excuse. The opposition of the Latins was a great stum- blingblock in the way of Gracchus ; the optimates were only able to counterbalance the popular party by thus leaguing themselves with the allies. But when the oli- garchy had gained the victory by the help of the socii, they afterwards basely sacrificed them, very nearly as the Irish Roman Catholics were sacrificed at the Union. About this time, already in the beginning of the year, Attalus died. The establishment of the province of Asia now forms an episode in the tribunate of Gracchus, in which he again showed himself to have been a states- man of deep thought, and earned great honour. Among the goods which the king left, was a large treasure, as is always the case with eastern princes, who, much as they spend, hoard as much again ; and this was sent to 284 TIBERIUS SEMPRONIUS GRACCHU& Rome. Now it is often thrown out as a reproach against Gracchus, that he divided it among the Roman people ; but there was nothing wrong in what he did. In Rome, as in the small Swiss cantons, every citizen had a share in the sovereignty ; besides which, the public cemrium was becoming richer every day, as the tributes already yielded so immense a surplus, that the citizens had no longer to pay any direct taxes. As the great mass of the people had now sunk into the lowest depths of wretchedness, this division was quite justifiable; and the more so, as land was to be assigned to them, and they wanted money to stock it. The triumvirs for the distribution of the land were now first to make out, which estates belonged to the republic, and which to private persons : for many had been sold, and many in the midst of the allotted districts had been left to their former owners ; so that the keeping of the registers was exceedingly difficult. The Romans had these registers, just as we have our surveys for the assessment of taxes ; but they were very carelessly done, as the seat of gov- ernment was at Rome alone, and there was hardly any- thing like sub-delegation. The time for choosing new tribunes was now at hand. The tribunes entered upon their functions on the ninth of December; but for a longer time than we can tell, the elections had been held at the end of June, or in the beginning of July, that the tribunate might never be vacant. As the tribunes took part in the discussions of the senate, and in these Gracchus was treated with a vulgar and most reckless fury, he could easily foresee, that when once out of office, he would be at the mercy of his foes : as triumvir agrorum dividundorum, he was not sacrosanctus. He therefore tried, in accordance with the laws, to have his tribuneship renewed. This was done very often in the first ages ; but it may have fallen into disuse, and thus the party against him have had the plea of prescription on the score of which they might withstand him. When the pnsrogatvaa had nominated fIBERIUS SEMPRONIUS GRACCHCS. 285 him, and another tribe had followed on the same side, the opposition declared this vote to be null and void, and demanded that the tribunes should not receive any suffrages for him. Q. Rubrius, a tribune who presided over the election, having become quite at a loss what to do, Mummius, another tribune who had been chosen instead of Octavius, said that Rubrius ought to yield his place to him : on this, as the other tribunes demanded that the matter should be decided by lot, a quarrel arose, and the day passed away without any- thing being settled. Gracchus already saw that his death was aimed at, and he went about with his child among the people, begging them to stand by him, and to save his life. In the earliest times, the pleles assem- bled on the forum ; but in the war with Hannibal al- ready, it always votes on the area before the temple in the Capitol ; I have not yet been able to find out when it was that this change began. It also seems that the votes were now given by word of mouth, and not, as formerly, on tablets, a custom which afterwards the Lex Cassia only restored, so that it is by no means to be looked upon as an innovation, as is generally thought. Professor Wunder has very correctly perceived this. Let no one believe that it is possible to honour Cicero more highly than I do ; yet I cannot help saying, that he is to be blamed for all the erroneous notions which are rife on this subject, as well as on so many others. Gracchus now was on the area of the Capitol, and was speaking most movingly to the people, who seemed as if they would uphold him. At any other time of the year, when the country folks were in great numbers in the city, he would undoubtedly have found the strongest protection ; but these were away on account of the har- vest, and the townspeople were not only lukewarm, but many of them were directly under the influence of the optimates. Here also we see how the constitution, ow- ing to circumstances, had become quite different from what it had been formerly under the self-same forms. 286 TIBERIUS SEMPRONIUS GRACCHUS. In the earlier ages, when the territory did not yet reach over many leagues, the citizens might assemble and the tribus rusticce be represented, if not fully, at least in con- eiderable numbers : but now that the Roman peasantry lived so far away, especially, for instance, after the assignments of Flaminius in the Romagna, they were no more able to come to town and vote ; and the form of the law, which was suitable to the former size of the • city, was now thoroughly preposterous and mischievous. On the following day, the elections were to go on, and people now met together with a gloomy foreboding that blood would be shed. Gracchus came only lightly armed. The senate was assembled in the temple of Fides. The votes were about to be given, when a tumult arose. The senate being near, at the news that there was an uproar among the people, Scipio Na- sica called upon the consul Mucius Scaevola to take strong measures. The latter appears in a doubtful light : according to most of the accounts, he seems to have been favourable to Gracchus ; according to others, just the reverse ; but if we suppose him to have been a weak-minded man who stood in fear of his faction, this contradiction may be accounted for. Nasica, seeing that a bold stroke would decide the matter, called upon all the senators to follow him ; and they all, to a man, while leaving the temple, declared Gracchus a traitor. The people fell back before men of such high rank, and the senators seized hold of everything that might serve as a weapon. There seem to have been scaffoldings erected all round (even now-a-days in Italy, wherever there is anything to be seen, benches are placed) ; part of these were broken in pieces. The report had been spread, that Gracchus had appeared with a diadem, and that he wanted to have himself proclaimed king: the senators, with the exception of some blockheads who would believe anything, well knew the whole to be a lie ; but the people, who could not tell their own mind, and had no leader, many of them dispersed. The senators TIBEEIU6 SEMPBONIUS GRACCHUS. 287 laid hold of the broken pieces of timber, and made an onset against the few unarmed men that were still ga- thering round Tiberius Gracchus, who, on their side, did not dare so much as to lift up a hand against the sena- tors. Tiberius fled down the centum gradus to the Ve- labrum ; and there his foot slipped, one of his pursuers — according to some, one of the common people; ac- cording to others, a senator, or a colleague of Gracchus (there were persons who afterwards disputed for the honour) — having pulled him by the toga: this man struck him on the head with a bit of wood, and when he fell down stunned, the murder was completed. Many of his followers shared the same fate, and their dead bodies were thrown into the Tiber : the carcase of the great man himself, having been washed ashore, was left to rot in the fields. He was not even yet thirty years old when he died. A great number were also arrested as accomplices. But the real persecution only began in the following year, under the consul P. Popillius Laenas, the descendant of one of the leaders of the plebes at the time of the Licinian law : he has left a terrible memory behind him. He caused thousands to be imprisoned, and some of them to be put to death without any trial, like a real Duke of Alva ; one he condemned to be thrust into a chest filled with snakes, an atrocity which Plutarch ex- pressedly speaks of in his life of Tiberius Gracchus. It is sad that even Cicero looks upon this Popillius Lae- nas as a man of honour. One anecdote I cannot help telling here. It was either at that time, or very likely eome years before, that Diophanes of Mitylene and C. Blossius of Cumae, the most intimate friends of Tib. Gracchus, were summoned before the inquisitorial tri- bunal, to give account of their connexion with Grac- chus. The latter answered, that his connexion was well known ; that Tib. Gracchus had been his most intimate friend. They then asked him, whether he had done everything that Gracchus had told him to do. He an- swered that he had. — " Whether he would have done 288 TIBERIUS SEMPRONIUS GRACCHUS. anything that Gracchus might subsequently have re- quired of him?" — "Yes," was his answer again. — • " Whether then he would at his bidding have set fire to the Capitol?" He said, that Gracchus could never have commanded such a thing. — " But what if he had com- manded it notwithstanding ? " — " Well then," said he, " I would have done it." This horrid speech was held to be a proof of his utter wickedness ; but it is not so much a disgrace to him who looked upon his friend as his better self, as to the man who wrung it out of him by his captious questions. Blossius got off; but he afterwards took away his own life, that he might not fall into the hands of these bloodthirsty wretches. It is remarkable, that the ruling party did not again abolish the new office of triumvirs, M. Fulvius Flaccus, the friend of Tiberius, being chosen in his room ; but the efficiency of these was hampered, and they were able to do nothing, as those who were called upon to show their titles to their estates, did not come forward, or else made no declaration. But when the first burst of their rage was over, they saw that they were playing a dangerous game ; and they left the laws of Gracchus untouched, and, for appearance's sake, appointed the consul Tuditanus to pass judgment on the disputed points : instead of doing this, he took the field, and thus the matter was put off. Whether anything was done at all, cannot be made out. When Ap. Claudius also died, he was succeeded by C. Papirius Carbo, an unworthy disciple of Gracchus, who did the same things as his master had done before him, but from bad motives. It is the curse of revolutions, that the onward march of events hurries along with it even good men who have once plunged into them ; the power of freeing oneself from the influence of what is passing around us, belongs only to that iron will which neither heeds nor shrinks from anything. A distinguished man, who had gone through all the horrors of the revolution, but had kept his hands unsullied, once said to me, " It is a terrible TIBERIUS SEMPRONIUS GRACCHUS. 289 remembrance to have lived to see a revolution, and to have had a share in it ; one goes to the attack along with the noble-minded, and one remains before the breach with the knaves." This one should have be- fore one's eyes as a warning ; but perhaps we may not have to dread a revolution for centuries to come. The period in Roman history which we have now reached, is one in which the explanation of forms is no longer sufficient ; we must take men psychologically, and make a study of the personal characters of those who tore from each other's grasp the spoils of the state when its life had fled from it. Carbo was a man of much talent ; but he was possessed by evil spirits : he might perhaps, in peaceful times, have be- longed to the number of fine souls ; but in that age, he sank down into the lowest depths of guilt and mean- ness. His character was such, that the charge of his having murdered Scipio, is not at all impossible in it- self : yet, as in the south it is so very common for it, to be reported that a man has been poisoned, if his death has exhibited any symptoms like it (as, for instance, in putrid fevers), we ought not to place unqualified be- lief in that suspicion. Scipio was laying siege to Numantia, when he heard the news of his brother-in-law's death ; and he expressed his approval of it. After his return to Rome, Carbo called upon him to declare whether he looked upon the death of Gracchus as just ; but he shuffled out of this, saying, that it was just, if Gracchus had meant to make himself king. This was mere senseless slander, and thus men's minds were generally embittered against Scipio. The oligarchs themselves were divided : not every one who had clamoured for Gracchus' blood, was therefore Scipio's friend ; but they all wanted him, and it flatter- ed his vanity to consider himself also as the protector of the Latins and of the allies. Tiberius' death had by no means brought the dispute to a decision ; far from it, it was carried on with unabated violence. Scipio in- II. T 290 TIBERIUS SEMPRONIUS GRACCHUS. tended to speak in the assembly of the people against the enforcing of the Sempronian law, which was never repealed ; as we may see from the original tables of the Lex Thoria (640-50), and the few fragments of a later agrarian law. The evening before the day on which he was to address the people, he had betaken himself to nest at an early hour, to think over his speech ; but in the morning he was found dead in his bed. This sud- den death now raised the suspicion of his having been murdered ; yet, strange to say, no inquiry was made, although it would have been the interest of the ruling party to have had one. The result might, however, perhaps have turned against this very party;* for in- stance, against Q. Pompeius, or Metellus : people even went so far as to charge Scipio's wife, Sempronia, a sis- ter of the Gracchi, with having got him out of the world by poison. Yet poisoned he could not have been, by all accounts; for as his corpse was borne upon an open bier, the symptoms of it would have shown themselves. If he died a violent death, he must have been strangled. From the death of Tiberius, to the first tribunate of Caius Gracchus, several remarkable measures were debated : the question of the new division of land was no more to be got rid of. Unluckily, we do not know the particulars : it is a pity that the books of Livy, from the 50th down to the 60th, have been lost. We have a decree of the tribune M. Junius Pennus, that the allies should be left in possession of their land, but should not be raised to the right of citizenship ; which was quite in the spirit of the oligarchy. In many towns of the Marsians, Samnites, and others, there were a great many rich and uncorrupted families, which, had they been engrafted upon the worn out Roman stock, would very soon have thrown the Roman aristocracy into * In Plutarch, Vtt. C. Qrcuxh., on the contrary, it is stated, lAr-rrifat i'i !TeA.Xo( «ai HccriXuirav T>IV XfiV/v uir\£ rev Ta.'liau ftitav yivnTeei, which, when applying to C. Gracchus, is hardly substantiated.— Germ. Ed, TIBERIUS SEMPRONIUS GRACCHUS. 291 the shade. For this reason, they were not to become citizens, but to keep their land ; and by this means it was hoped to quiet them. But when they saw them- selves thus taken in in every way, they began to plot together: the details, however, of this conspiracy are shrouded in darkness. In the lifetime of Tib. Gracchus already, there had been a talk of giving the right of citizenship to the Latins, especially to Tibur and Prse- neste, and perhaps also to the towns of the Hernicans, but above all, to the colonies. These consisted of Ro- mans, Latins, and Hernicans of all kinds, who lived under the Latin law, and had the best claims to the right of citizenship ; but Gracchus must either have put off his plans with regard to them, or have quite given them up. Now they insisted upon having it, as it had been chiefly their support which had upheld the senate. It is inconceivable how Fregellse, the most flourishing of them, could at that time have been so mad as to take up arms ; the other Latins would have nothing to do with it, and the colonies were scattered throughout the whole country. The Italians proper, as they stood one step lower down, were perhaps not always glad when the Latins got such privileges; they rejoiced at their trouble, and gave them no help. The praetor L. Opi- mius besieged, conquered, and destroyed Fregellae : not a trace is left of the town, and a dreadful revenge was taken on the people. CAIUS SEMPRONIUS GBACCHTJS. IT is beyond a doubt, that C. Gracchus surpassed his brother in talent : he was altogether a different man. The parallel drawn by Plutarch between Agis and Cleo- menes and the two brothers, is a very happy one. Of the speeches of Tiberius, nothing has been left to us ; from those of Caius, many passages are quoted. He was 292 CAIUS SEMPRONIFS GRACCHUS. the first refined, polished, and elegant writer of the Ro- man nation : Scipio and Laelius are still strikingly rough and harsh, as Tib. Gracchus also certainly must have been, more so perhaps, even than Cato ; (we see this from a fragment, hitherto unknown,* of a speech of Laelius, in an unpublished commentary of Cicero which Mai has discovered.) In what still remains of him, we find Cicero's saying borne out, that he had been the first to come forth in an old literature with a new lan- guage ; even as among the French, Corneille forms the link between the antique and the classic. In all likeli- hood, the language of C. Gracchus was far older than that of Cicero, or even Sisenna ; but it nevertheless had the stamp of the modern age, and none of the stiffness and mustiness of the earlier times. He was perhaps also more of a statesman than his brother ; at least he showed himself more to have been such, the reason of which may have been, that while the career of Tiberius was ended in seven months, he was engaged in public life much longer: his activity began even before his tribuneship; and the two years that he was tribune, and yet a half a year besides, it was in full play. His high accomplishments, and the development of his cha- racter, he owed chiefly to his excellent mother: the kindly disposition of the Gracchi is seen also in their affectionate behaviour to their mother, the like of which was very seldom to be found elsewhere among the Romans. On the whole, we know very little indeed of the domestic relations of the Romans ; yet we may reckon as examples Horace's loving mention of his fa- ther, and that of Agricola by Tacitus. Caius was driven on by fate into the path in which he met with his ruin. Heart-broken by the death of his brother, he seemed as if he wished to keep away from the higher offices of the state : he rose indeed to * It is now printed in Atwtorcs d/isiki e raticanis Codd. editi, eiir. Any, HJJO, Vol II. -ftj.H. JS.'S. (SchoL. Bobieiuia in Cic. Milon. c. 7. in OreUi V. 1. p. 283.) CA.ICS SEMPRONIUS GRACCHUS. 293 be a triumvir, — there he could not help himself, — but even then he would only act where it was possible for him to do so without shaking the existing state of things. But there was an inward call, which would not let him follow his own inclinations, although he foresaw his doom. At a very early age he had the eyes of the people bent upon him ; he had served for twelve years, had been quaestor in Sardinia, and thus already had awakened jealousy : for a young man who displayed the most perfect disinterestedness, was a reproach and an object of hatred to every one. When the soldiers were in want of warm clothing, and the miserly senate would not grant any money, he did not rest until he had scraped together in the province, and from other sources, the means of buying warm cloaks ; he also got a cargo of corn from Micipsa, the king of Numidia. All these things gave rise to such rancour and ill-feeling, that it was intended to keep him in Sardinia, where, even at that time, the air was so unwholesome, that it was hoped that he would fall a victim to it. By law he was only obliged to be there for one year ; but he had been three years in the island, and therefore he now went without leave to Rome, where he publicly justified himself, show- ing how he had been thwarted in everything. This made such an impression, that not only did the tribunes take him under their protection, but he was himself chosen to be tribune of the people for the following year, and that under more favourable auspices than his bro- ther had been : for among the enlargements of the tri- bunician power, which the senate had yielded, owing to their evil conscience, since the death of Tib. Gracchus, there had also been a plebiscitum passed, by which a tribune who wished to carry through his laws, might be elected twice. In the year 629, C. Gracchus entered upon his tribuneship. He was upright and pure, like Tiberius, but passionate ; he was superior to his brother in energy, and he knew more clearly what he was about. With regard to the possession of land, in the outset 294 CAIUS SEMPRONIUS GHACCHUS. he had indeed only to enact Tiberius' laws : but he aim- ed also far beyond these at other reforms : since, as a tribune, he had a power just as lawful as that of the senate itself, and therefore did not act the part of a re- volutionist. But had he also a chance of success ? That was the question. In his own mind, he was satisfied that his cause could make its way. It is a pity that we do not get a sight of the whole of his plan ; the most important points are the very ones which have been the most corrupted : his legislation consisted of a number of detached laws which affected the most different branches of the state. What we know of it, is quite enough to show how little he was of a demagogue. There are seemingly the greatest contradictions in it ; but they vanish when we look at them from the right point of view : for we thus see that he did not wish to lend himself to any party. Far from it, he made use of the factions to carry out wholesome reforms, holding out to one side such and such advantage, and to the other something else, while he himself stood quite apart. His first step, as tribune of the people, was, of course, to avenge the death of his brother and his friends. Na- sica had gone off with a commission to Asia, and did not return. His first law was that no one who had been deprived of his office by the people, should be invested with any other : this bill, which was evidently aimed against Oc- tavius, he withdrew at the intercession of his mother. The second enacted that those men should be punished with death, who, without any previous trial, had laid hands upon Roman citizens, and slain them. This was chiefly directed against Lsenas, who, when it passed, went into voluntary exile. Of the speech, in which Gracchus made these motions, we have a fine fragment still left, which Gellius pedantically criticises. These were the offerings with which he made atonement to the dead. The carrying out of the agrarian law had been de- CAIUS SEMPRONIUS GRACCHUS. 2.05 creed, and it went on, though rather sluggishly. The measure which has been most found fault with, is his having first brought in the practice of distributing corn to the common people living at Rome : in the way in which he did it, the modius of corn was to be given out at three-quarters of an as, one-fourth of what it would cost elsewhere. This surely was not by any means a bribe, but a charity to the poor who wanted it. Rome had those great revenues which were paid in grain, and the treasury was so rich that it was not necessary to convert the corn into money. At the time of the Social war, there were about seventy- four millions sterling in the treasury, and these certainly could not be better be- stowed than for the good of the poor : besides which, even from of old, corn had been distributed in the tem- ple of Ceres ; so that this was not even an innovation. The idea of a certain dignity being inherent in every one who belongs to a free people, lies at the bottom of everything that is done in a republic. A commonwealth has the duty of providing for its members, even for the most humble : this is a principle which England in some measure follows in her poor's rates, whereas there is nothing of the kind in a despotic country, to belong to which gives no privilege. Now it so happened that part of the true Roman citizens, who also had their share with the rest in the sovereignty, were as poor as those paupers among us, who are maintained by the alms of the public : their numbers must have been immense ; some of them were not in the tribes at all ; others, as, for instance, the descendants of freedmen, were in the tribw urbanae. The Gracchi wished to make peasants of as many of them as possible ; but this could not be done with all, nor perhaps had the greater part of that plebe* even so much as a claim to it, as the division of the land was to be according to tribes. C. Gracchus did not want the corn to be given them entirely for nothing ; but at such a rate that they might easily earn their livelihood by their work. From this time, I believe the 298 CAIUS SEMPRONIUS GRACCHUS. difference of the pleles urlana and the thirty-five tribes to be dated, the free Roman citizens of lower rank being the main elements of that plebes. Another of Gracchus' measures was for the relief of the soldier. Every soldier had formerly to find his arms, and part of his pay was kept back to defray the expense of repairing them. But the treasury was so very full, that the sacrifice was not felt, if those who had to serve, had at least their arms given them. This point C. Gracchus carried. He also established between the quay, the Aventine, and the Monte Testaccio, a corn- magazine (horrea popijli Romani) : this afterwards ex- panded into immense buildings, the traces of which were very distinctly seen even so late as in the sixteenth century. Moreover, he made highways, and gave a new impulse to paving : it was perhaps under his manage- ment that the great Roman roads were brought to that perfection which we still admire in them ; for he had them paved with basalt, which until then had been done on a small piece of the Appian road only. By this means he gave employment to the poor man, who was thus enabled to get his living. All these arrangements were administrative ones ; he now went on to make others which affected the consti- tution itself. The senate was at that time without con- trol with regard to one of the most important branches of civil government : Polybius already remarks, that the great power of the senate in so democratical a republic was owing to two causes. In the first place, it had quite an unbounded power over the finances ; so that many were dependent on it for their incomes. All the revenues of the state from customs, mines, tithes, and other sources, were let to companies of wealthy Ro- mans ; and these again in their business employed the lower classes down to the very lowest, who, therefore, were all of them under the influence of the senate, which had the supreme direction : thus indeed, though every one engaged in this way did not get his maintenance CAIUS SEMPRONIUS GRACCIIUS. 297 from a government employment, as with us ; the result was practically the same among the Romans, that the state itself provided for a great part of its subjects. Hence swarms of these citizens spread themselves as ne- gotiatores over the provinces, and sucked their life's blood. This was one of the circumstances which enabled the small body of the senate to stand its ground so steadily. The other means which it had, was, that all these peo- ple were obliged to have their patrons in the senate it- self, and that the judges in nearly all the more impor- tant causes were senators ; at least in all those which did not directly concern Quiritary property. It is one of the erroneous notions to be found everywhere, that in ancient Rome a sort of jury had existed, which was instituted only after the laws of Gracchus. During the earlier times, no trial was required in any case of delic- tn/m manifestum; the identity of the person being proved, the praetor immediately enforced the law, and that was all. In other cases, as in criminal causes and those civil suits which were not brought before the centum viri, the decision of one arbiter was needed, before the praetor could pass a sentence which might be acted upon. The complaint was laid before the praetor, who after thirty days named a judge. The latter gave judg- ment according to certain fixed rules, from which there was no further appeal ; for the appeal which there had once been to the people had been done away with, whilst for anything that was not judicium publicum, none per- haps had ever been allowed. Since the seventh century, several pleas for which formerly special qucesitores had been appointed, from whom they came before the po- pular tribunals, were now judged according to the com- mon course of law ; especially the actions repetundarum, the complaints of the unfortunate provincials against their governors : for these, however, several judges were granted. But this single judge, or, as the case might be, these several judges, were always senators; and this was indeed a strong tie, by which the senate strengthen- 293 CAIUS SEMPRONIUS GRACCHUS. ed its authority. But these courts were detestable: the most scandalous judgments were given; and the senator who by lot had become judex, allowed himself to be bribed in the most barefaced manner, no one mak- ing any secret of it : nor indeed was any body ashamed of doing thus ; those who were not to be bought formed but a small exception, and that perhaps merely from cal- culation. The right of bringing an action made the provinces yet worse off than if they had been utterly debarred from it ; for the governor had to plunder so much the more, that he might be able to bribe his judges. This reminds me of the saying of the Neapoli- tan minister, the prince of Canosa, an eccentric but witty man : he said, that no where out of the kingdom of Naples could one get so many false witnesses for a carlino (about fourpence) each ; and that, if one want- ed a quantity of them, they were to be had cheaper still. Thus the senators in Rome merely asked, " How many thousands will you give me, that I may acquit you ?" One crow does not pick out the eyes of the other. This was revolting, and it was clear that it would bring the state to ruin : a change was necessary, and that of Gracchus was certainly the best as things were, though, on the other hand, it might also have ill consequences. He cast his eyes upon that body of men which now in some measure filled the place of a middle class, although sometimes possessing immense riches : it was composed of those who had more than a hun- dred thousand deiwrii (400,000 sesterces), there being no longer any other standard but that of wealth. From what is called the people, Gracchus expected nothing whatever ; he knew that part of it was a rabble which either did not care for anything, or else was open to the worst bribery ; the knights, on the other hand, had no in- terest to screen the misdeeds of those who were in power. As in the senate there were three hundred members, Gracchus transferred the jurisdiction to a like number of knights in their stead. That the three hundred knights CAIUS SEMPRONIUS GRACCHUS. 299 were alone to be the judges, and that, as the case might require, each of these was one by one to be chosen by lot from among them, is placed beyond a doubt by the researches of Manutius. At first, this did not altogether work badly, as these new judges had none of the family and other connexions of the leading senators at Rome ; but, on the other hand, they were no fair judges for the provincials. The Roman companies which farmed the revenue, consisted chiefly of knights, and they had been guilty of most unrighteous dealings in the provinces. Hitherto these had been ground down by the magis- trates who had been sent to rule over them ; and now that a remedy had been found for the evil, if the latter chose to make a bargain with the knights, they could buy them over by letting them go beyond their contracts, and take, for instance, one-fifth, instead of the tenth which was their due. In return for this, the knights would guarantee them impunity, should they be prose- cuted for extortion. This was a monstrous abuse, occa- sioned by accidental circumstances ; but for Rome and Italy the change was an improvement : and so it was on the whole for all those places to which the farming com- panies did not extend. This fell upon the senators like a thunderbolt. And when an independent body of judges had now been formed, Gracchus went still farther: he substituted their jurisdiction for those popular tribunals which were not worth anything, and which henceforth are only met with as an exception. This was setting bounds to demo- cracy, where democracy was no longer in its right place. In order to put better blood into the veins of the thirty-five tribes, he wished to extend the full right of citizenship to the Latins, among whom there were some forty colonial towns besides the old Latin cities : they had existed for three hundred years, and had for two centuries been entirely amalgamated by language and manners with the Romans; and in all likelihood he meant to form them into new tribes. The Italian allies, 800 CAIUS SEMPRONIUS GRACCHUS. on the other hand, from Lucania to the March of An- cona, nay all the Italian districts as far as to the Alps, he wished to raise to that position which the Latins then held ; that is to say, to give them a vote in the assem- bly of tho people, and prepare them to become full citi- zens after thirty or forty years. It may even be that something was really done to carry this out. This law again was most wise and judicious, and those who were for a reasonable aristocracy must have rejoiced at it. In the Latin towns, there were many good families of local celebrity, which were now to be ranked among the Ro- man citizens. In Augustus' times, the most distin- guished families came from the allied towns : the Asinii were Marrucinians ; thus also, the Muuatii and others ; according to Cicero, literature was more cultivated among them than at Rome. Thus, an aristocracy of wealth and refinement was to be brought in ; a wiser and more praiseworthy scheme than that of C. Gracchus, there could not possibly have been. Many of his laws are either not known to us at all, or only from occasional notices. Though he wished to make the plebeians good husbandmen, if he could, and therefore assigned land to them, he did not make them a present of it. The state, the interests of which Gracchus did not lose sight of, had hitherto always had the tithes from the occupants ; and this burthen he allowed to continue, as we learn from a passage in Plutarch which can have no other meaning. To him it seemed evident, that Rome could only hold her own by returning to her first principles : he therefore gave the Italians hopes of the right of citizenship, and also moved for a reform of the manner of voting ; so that the republic would no longer have comprised one city, but the whole of Italy. The distribution of the provinces had until now given rise to the greatest intrigues in the senate. Sometimes the tribunes even interfered. When the new consuls and praetors had come in, and the reference was made de provinciis, every one would apply for himself, and CAIUS SEMPRONIUS GRACCHUS. 301 try to get what seemed to him most favourable to his purpose of enriching himself; and the senate decided from personal considerations. At that time already, the elections took place long before the end of the year. C. Gracchus now made the wise rule, that the senate should settle before the elections, to what provinces a consul or a praetor was to be sent, and then assign them after- wards to the persons who were to have them : this was wont to be done by lot, and thus anything like favour- itism was put an end to. This rid the republic of a great many evils. He, no doubt, was also the one who brought in the rule of having the comitia held so early, tliat the year might not come to an end without the curule chair being filled. This is one of the real and lasting im- provements of Gracchus, and it was still in force seventy years after his death. These laws of his, Gracchus made in 629 and 630, having been tribune for two years running. His tri- bunate was less stormy than that of his brother, as he had much greater power, and was less thwarted. He got himself, and his friend M. Fulvius Flaccus, and very likely Q. Rubrius also, to be appointed triumvirs for the establishing of colonies ; for his activity was unwearied, and it was felt in all the branches of the state to which his influence as tribune could reach. Among others, he had founded a colony by the side of old Carthage, and against this settlement a hypocritical outcry was raised, as if it might one day become dangerous to Rome ; a most senseless notion, which some folks even held in good earnest. The jealousy and spite against him had now risen to the highest pitch, and the present oppor- tunity was seized to harass him. The senate, with fiendish cunning, egged on another tribune, M. Livius Drusus, to outbid him in liberality to the people, and that in the name of the senate, so as to undermine his popularity. The great mass did not care, who it was that offered a boon to them ; they thought, " Gracchus wants to buy and cheat us, Livius bids more : let us 302 CAIUS SEMPRONIUS GRACCHUS. take what we can get, and not let ourselves be cheat- ed." Such, the Italians are even to this day. I myself have seen a striking example of this in the citizen of a small town, who had some coins which I valued for him. He fancied that I wanted to overreach him ; and imme- diately after, he asked me, for a piece which I wished to buy, three times as much as I had told him, whereas before that, I might have had all of them for the third part of what they were worth. When one gives the modern Romans any advice from real kindness, and with perfect disinterestness, they will at once suspect you of having some secret end in view ; for indeed they will not trust anybody. Thus it was also in those times. Livius did away with the tithes with which the lands were still burthened ; and instead of the two colonies which Gracchus had proposed, he founded twelve, each of which was to consist of three thousand citizens. This the rich could easily grant, the only losers by it being the old inhabitants, unhappy men who hitherto had dwelt by sufferance on the soil where their ancestors had been conquered ; for the estates of the rich were only in those places where the old towns had been de- stroyed. With regard to these colonies of Livius, we may ask, have they really been founded ? There seems to be no doubt of it, as those of Gracchus were certainly established; indeed they were in all likelihood those duodecim colonies in Cicero's oration pro Cceciiia, about which there has been so much controversy. These can- not have had any reference to what happened in the war with Hannibal, when the number of those which had re- mained faithful was eighteen ; so that eighteen and not twelve must have had the commercium given them as a boon. The MSS. have XII. : it has been proposed to write XIIX. instead ; but this kind of notation is not met with in any of the old manuscripts. If, as I take it for granted, they were not twelve new colonies, but twelve Latin towns which, as they had a great deal of unoccupied ground, were increased by three thousand CAIUS SEMPEONIUS GRACCHUS. 303 citizens, it is quite easy to understand why they had better rights than the other colonies. Gracchus saw that the thoughtless people turned away from him to the senate, and to the tools of the senate who deceived them. There are many men, frank and kindly souls, who heartily love the Beautiful, and are delighted at seeing distinguished men play their part, and look upon them as the ornaments of their age ; others think of nothing but themselves : driven on by envy and jealousy, and grieved at hearing any name praised be it ever so slightly, even when it does not harm them in the least, they are glad if they can dis- cover any weaknesses in great men. All this tribe now raised an outcry against Gracchus, laughing at him as a doctriiiaire, a man of crotchets and theories. He had now for so long a time enjoyed great consideration, and he stood forth in too full a blaze of light not to become an eyesore to many people ; just as the Athenian citizen gave his vote against Aristides, because he was called the Just. Thus it came to pass, that when he again offered himself as a candidate for the tribuneship, he was rejected ; nor is there any reason to believe that his colleagues had been guilty of foul play. Among the in- dependent educated middle classes only, Gracchus seems to have had many partisans ; but these had not much political weight, and his friends of high rank were hot- headed people. In the year 631, bis enemy L. Opimius, the destroyer of Fregellae, whom, the year before, he had kept out of the consulship, was chosen consul. For when he was in the heyday of his popularity, he once asked the people to promise him a favour ; this they granted, and while it was thought that he would de- mand great things, he begged the consulship for C. Fannius. The latter was a homo novus, at least for the consulship, and it would have been hard for him to get it without the help of Gracchus : he, however, soon left him, and went over to his foes. Opimius also was a plebeian ; but, like Popillius Laenas, he sided with the 301 CAIUS SEMPRONIUS GRACCHUS. aristocracy against Gracchus. The oligarchical party was bent upon getting up a quarrel. Gracchus, now that he was no longer sacrosanctus, did not feel sure of his life, and was therefore always surrounded by many of his friends. The measures of the senate became more and more hostile: the colonies granted to him were to be broken up by a decree of that body, and there was a deliberation on the subject ; one of the tribunes more- over, who had been nominated by the oligarchs, spoke to the people then assembled before the Capitol, against Gracchus, and when the latter came forward to defend himself, he was charged in a tumultuous manner with having interrupted the tribune. The consul, who just then was offering a sacrifice on the Capitol, sent one of his lictors, as if to fetch something for the sacrifice, but in reality for another purpose ; and the man while forcing his way across the friends of Gracchus, cried out, " Ye evil-minded fellows ! make room for the good citi- zens !" One of them was rash enough to strike him ; a tumult arose, and the lictor was murdered. His dead body was displayed in the forum, and a scene was got up, as if he had been a martyr to the good cause. For the first time,* the senate now passed the decree, vide- rent Consoles, ne quid detriments res publica caperet. Opi- mius was invested with dictatorial power ; for the cus- tom of making dictators had fallen into disuse, as it could no longer be managed in the old forms, the curies having ceased to exist. Gracchus now took leave of his wife and children; after which, he and Fulvius went to the Aventine, the ancient refuge for persecuted inno- cence. He had had no foreboding of the misfortune which had come upon him : his whole party was all in confusion, and he could not make up his mind to let things go on to extremity. His friend and colleague, * This is perhaps to be modified thus, that this formula here occurs for the first time since the abolition of the dictatorship (in the middle of the sixth century) : it is, on the whole, very old, and we meet with it for tile first tiine iii the year '.'90. Liv. Ill, 4.— Germ. Edit. CAIUS SEMPRONIUS GRACCHUS. 305 the consular M. Fulvius Flaccus, who was more resolute, armed some of the common people, and slaves ; in short, any one whom he could get. The mob itself — from henceforth we meet with nothing better — for which Gracchus had no sympathies, left him to bis fate, taking him for a knave or a fool, and being quite content, sq^ long as they kept the benefits which he had gained fors them. Thus it cost the consuls no trouble to attack the Aventine, though they had only a small force, the city being either paralyzed or indifferent. The knights, whom Gracchus had nearly remodelled as an order, were likewise idle lookers on, owing to that fear which is in- herent in rich men whose wealth is not in landed pro- perty, but merely in money. This class shows itself lukewarm in every commotion, and lets itself be tram pled on in every possible way, as we see, for instance, in the history of Florence. Gracchus sent to the senate to effect a compromise ; hut unconditional surrender was demanded. The Aven- tine being feebly defended, the divus Publiciiis, by which one ascended from the Circus, was taken by storm ; and now Fulvius sent his son, a fine, handsome youth, to the senate, to ask for a truce. He was sent back the first time ; and when he came again, Opimius had him arrested, thrown into a dungeon, and afterwards put to death. When the Aventine was taken, Fulvius, who had hidden himself, was found and slain; Gracchus leaped from the temple of Diana down the sharp steep of the Aventine, and sprained his ankle ; not being able to find a horse, he, leaning on his friends, could hardly reach the Pons sublicius. The two friends, Pomponius and Lsetorius, who were knights, and formed an honour- able exception to the majority of the higher classes, fought like Horatius Codes on the bridge, to keep the pursuers at bay, and allowed themselves to be cut down. In the meanwhile, Gracchus fled across the Tiber into a sacred grove (lucus Furiarum), which, how- ever, did not shelter him. Opimius had promised for II. V 306 CAIUS SEMPRONIUS GRACCHUS. hia head its weight in gold. According to the most likely account, a faithful slave did him the friendly ser- vice of killing him. An Anagnian, Septimuleius, got the head, and filled it with molten lead. Upwards of three thousand men were denounced as partisans of Gracchus, and nearly all of them were put to death by Opimius ; a few only may have made their escape. This war of extermination was waged against all who were in any way distinguished : it was a downright butchery, like that of the year 1799 at Naples. For two years the bloodshed lasted, and these murderers called them- selves boni homines, boni cives. There were many rene- gades, and there is no doubt but that C. Carbo was very early one of them. He became consul, and then defend- ed Opimius against the charges brought against him by the tribune Q. Decius. Carbo, after he had saved Opi- mius, became the darling of the oligarchs; but now there arose against him P. Licinius Grassus, a near kins- men of his, perhaps a brother of the wife of C. Grac- chus, and the very one of whom Cicero so often speaks, especially in the masterly dialogue de Oratore, and in his " Brutus." Crassus was a man of uncommon mind and powers ; but like all the orators of that age (with the exception of C. Gracchus), wanting in cultivation. He too began on the side of the people, and then he went over to the senate, and became one of the foremost champions of the oligarchy ; yet he is a very respectable oligarch, and quite free from the reproach which clings to so many others. He now spoke against Carbo, and attacked him in such a manner, that he took away his own life by means of poison (a solution of vitriol, atra- rnentum tutorium).* This was a satisfaction to men's feelings, and it gave a hope of the possibility that things would still change for the better. But for all that, they remained as they were : the knights were intimidated ; * CanOwindat sumpstisie dicitur. Cits. Fam. IX. 21 : it was another Cn. INpirius Carbo, who put an end to himself bj means of atramentum »u- tormm. Ctc. iWd.— Germ. Edit. FOREIGN CONQUESTS. 307 the courts of justice were no better, nor were any fruits whatever of their independence yet to be seen. The utter worthlessness of those who were in power is strik- ingly shown in the war of Jugurtha, which Sallust, with his fine tact, has therefore made the subject of his historical work. But we must first speak of the con- quests of the empire. FOREIGN CONQUESTS DOWN TO THE WAR WITH JUGURTHA. IN Spain, few events of any importance happened be- tween the time of Tib. Gracchus and the war with Ju- gurtha. The Balearic isles were subdued by one of the four sons of Metellus Macedonicus, all of whom were consuls. The Metelli were plebeians, but one of the most powerful families which formed the aristocracy ; and they were truly great characters : Metellus Numi- dicus also, notwithstanding the reproaches which have been brought against him, is one of the most spotless 6~f men. Another son of Metellus conquered the Dalma- tians, who from henceforth remained subject to the Romans ; so that one might now go by land to Greece round the Adriatic. Soon after the death of Tib. Gracchus, the Romans made their first expedition into Transalpine Gaul. They were masters of nearly the whole of Spain, and of Italy almost as far as the Alps (Aosta did not yet belong to them) ; but in Gaul itself, between the Alps and the Pyrenees, they had not yet even tried to gain a firm footing : all that they did, was to secure for the Massi- lians, their old allies, in the beginning of the seventh century, a strip of country along the coast against the Ligurians. The first occasion for their establishing themselves there, was a war of the Salluvians or Salyans against the Ligurians : the Salluvians, who dwelt from Aix to Marseilles, were conquered by them. This tribe 308 • FOREIGN CONQUESTS. had been supported by the Allobroges, one of the great- est peoples of Gaul, who had their abodes in Dauphine and Savoy, as far as Lyons ; and when these had like- wise been defeated, the Romans turned their arms against the Arvernians, a race governed by rich and powerful kings, which as far back as the second Punic War, held the supremacy in Gaul. These last were ut- terly routed on the banks of the Rhone near Vienne, in the days of C. Gracchus. Bituitus, of whose wealth various accounts have been preserved, was at that time their king : he tried to make his peace with the Ro- mans, and the generals, Q. Pabius Maximus (who was afterwards surnamed AUobrogicus), and On. Domitius, sent him to Rome to beg the mercy of the senate. With- out having come in deditionem, he went thither, trust- ing to the good faith of those who were in power ; but they arrested him, and kept him a prisoner to the day of his death at Alba on the lake Fucinus, where Syphax and Perseus had died. The Roman province now reach- ed as far as Dauphine. The Allobroges in that country, though they acknowledged the nwjestas populi Romani, did not become subjects; but Provence and Lower Languedoc, were real provinces, although there was not always a praetor there. The time when the Roman provincial institutions were introduced, cannot be exact- ly made out, owing to the loss of the books of Livy. Aquae Sextiae was the first Roman colony beyond the Alps. In 638 the Cimbri make their first appearance. After the reduction of Dalmatia, the Romans had attacked Carniola, which is said to have roused the anger of the Scordiscans, It is, however, more likely that the immi- gration of the Sarmatians from the east stirred up the Scordiscans, who now fell upon Macedon and Greece. This was one of the greatest calamities of the unfortu - nate sixth and seventh centuries of the city, which were •ome of the most awful for the world itself; just as the sixteenth and seventeenth of our era in modern history : THE WAR AGAINST JUQURTHA. 309 it destroyed most of the beautiful works of ancient art. In Italy, that havoc went on until the times of Augus- tus, which were the first beginning of a kind of mate- rial prosperity. The consul C. Porcius Cato was routed in Thrace by the Scordiscans, and Macedon, Thessaly, and part of Greece, were overrun by the barbarians. THE WAR AGAINST JUGURTHA. Q. CJECILIUS METELLU8 NUMIDICCS. C. MARIUS. SALLUST'S description of the war against Jugurtha, is one of the best specimens which we have in either lan- guage of the ancient literature, and I would even rate it above that of Catiline's conspiracy. They are mono- graphies, almost the only ones which the Romans had, ex- cept perhaps the history of the war with Hannibal by Coelius Antipater, of which, however, we know nothing : the memoirs of Fannius were something quite different. Sallust takes indeed the utmost care to avoid anything that has an annalistic look ; he leaves out every men- tion of dates, to give his work the greatest possible fin- ish. It is a book which, the more one reads it, the more worthy of admiration it seems : it is a real study for every one who wants to know what excellent his- torical writing is. To him I refer you. When Masinissa died, he had put his kingdom in order, and made Scipio executor of his will. He left his dominions to his three sons, Gulussa, Micipsa, and Mastanabal, whom we are by no means to look upon as having been somewhat like the chieftains of the tribes which now dwell in those countries ; for Livy says of Mastanabal, that he had been litteris Grcecis apprime eruditus. He knew Greek so well, that he wrote it ; a fact which shows us how wrongly we deem the Numi- dians and all such races to have been mere barbarians. Even among the rude Thracians, there can be no doubt 310 THE WAR AGAINST JUGURTHA. that at that time Greek learning was not unknown ; we meet with it afterwards even among the Parthians. The civilization of the Greeks had spread very widely, more especially since the fall of the nation. The Numi- dians, as well as the Libyans, had an alphabet of their own, as one sees from remains which are found in sev- eral towns in those parts. Colonel Humbert has dis- covered over the gate of a city an inscriptio bilinguis, Punic and Libyan ; in Gyrene, there are inscriptions in three languages, Punic, Greek, and one which is un- known; in the desert of Sahara, among the Tuariks, the travellers Clapperton and Denham have met with an alphabet which is quite distinct from the Arabic. I am convinced that it belongs to the Libyan language, which is spoken in the Canary isles, throughout the whole of the desert and the oases, as far as the Nile and the Barabras in Upper Egypt. Denham * is too shal- low, to see his way through it ; we shall be able to read the Libyan inscriptions when we fully know the alpha- bet, of which Denham gives one letter. The whole of this matter will one day be cleared up. The Numidian kings likewise had the Carthaginian library given them as a present by the Romans. Gulussa died early, as also did Mastanabal, who left behind him only a son by a concubine, Jugurtha. The Numidian empire, which reached from the borders of Morocco to the Syrtes as far as Leptis and Tripolis, was now in the hands of Micipsa alone. He had two sons, Adherbal and Hiempsal. Jugurtha, who had excellent abilities, at first won the heart of the old king ; but when the latter discovered in him talents superior to those of his own sons, he became jealous of him, and sent him to Spain, where Scipio was gathering troops together from all parts for the siege of Numantia : there he hoped that he would perish. But Jugurtha was befriended by for- tune ; and he gained great favour with Scipio, under * I cannot answer for the correctness of the name ; it occurs, indis- tinctly written, only in one of my MSS. of 1826-7.— Germ. Edit. THE WAR AGAINST JTTGURTHA. 31 1 whose protection he desired to be placed, lest Micipsa should murder him. Many Romans of rank even en- couraged him to revolt, and provided him with money, as he had no prospect of coming to the throne lawfully ; for after Micipsa's death, the whole of the kingdom waff to be kept together. He now got letters of recommen- dation to Micipsa, who, taking fright, adopted him, and in his will divided the sovereignty among the three princes, who were to reign together as colleagues. The proud and fierce Hiempsal, who looked upon his cousin as an intruder, would insult him without any provoca- tion : it was then agreed upon to share the inheritance, and in the meanwhile Jugurtha had him murdered. Jugurtha, who was no common man, being shrewd and versatile, but without any notion of truth and honesty, like an Albanian chief, now took up arms and attacked Adherbal also. The latter betook himself to the Ro- mans, and owing to their predilection for him obtained a favourable decision: a commission was sent from Rome to divide the country between himself and Jugur- tha. The commissioners, however, were so well plied with gold, that, when the division was made, Jugurtha got the most powerful and warlike part of the country. But he longed for the whole, and thus a war was soon brought on again. Adherbal imploringly besought the help of Rome against this criminal and restless man, and in the senate, at first, his cause was found to be a j ust one ; but the ruling oligarchs, headed by Opimius, and bought over with bribes, declared for Jugurtha, and hin- dered every decision. In the meantime, Adherbal was beset in Cirta, and driven to the last distress : his re- presentations to the Roman senate were all baffled by the influence of L. Opimius, as the envoys of Jugur- tha, who were at Rome with a large sum of money, pur- chased the votes of every one. But when Cirta had been brought to extremity, some of the friends of Ad- herbal stole out of the town, and carried to the senate most dismal letters : a new commission was now sent. 312 THE WAR AGAINST JUGURTHA. which was likewise bribed, and returned without hav- ing raised the siege. Jugurtha, however, was impelled by Nemesis not to keep his promise to Adherbal, when he yielded himself up and stipulated for his life only ; nor to the Roman and Italian negotiators, who alone had upheld that prince, and who now also surrendered. He had them slaughtered to sate his vengeance. This was too bad, and even those who had hitherto spoken most loudly for him, had no longer a word to say. A Roman embassy arrived at Utica, to call Jugurtha to account ; but he gave evasive answers and completely took them in. This embassy was headed by M. JSmilius Scaurus, a man who has a great name in history, but of whom one is at a loss what to think, Horace says, Regulum et Scauros Grains insigni referam Camena, Fabriciumque. As for Horace, it is remarkable that no one could be more ignorant of the history of his own people than he was ; thus, for instance, he confounds the two Scipios, and he had so little read Ennius whom he laughs at, as to believe that he had sung of Scipio, the destroyer of Carthage. * When he names Scaurus, he says Scaur i, not knowing that Scaurus the son was a most worthless fellow, the Verres of Sardinia, whom Cicero defended merely out of regard for his family. It is owing to this un-Roman spirit, that he is utterly unable to ap- preciate the great minds of the earlier literature ; he is a man of elegant, superficial learning, and, even in his knowledge of the Greek writers, not to be compared with Virgil. Hence then so many strange things in his Odes, where he misunderstood the Greek. The stock- in-trade which he had for his odes, was taken from a few Greek lyrics. When he says that Homer was wont * See Bentl. ad Hor. Cairo. IV, 8, 17 ; who, however, strikes out that line, from metrical reasons also. Others conjecture that there is a hiatus in that passage. — Germ. Edit. THE WAR AGAINST JUGURTHA. 813 to slumber, he merely shows his ignorance ; he writes to Lollius that he had again read Homer, which may perhaps have been for the first time since he left school. Still he is a noble genius, much more versatile and pro- lific than Virgil, who, indeed, was far more industrious and painstaking. Horace was lazy, ever bent on refined enjoyments. The contrast between the two poets is very striking; it would be an excellent subject, if work- ed out. — What speaks well for Scaurus, is the great re- spect in which he was held by Cicero, who mentions, as one of the finest remembrances of his earlier days, that as a youth of seventeen he was introduced by his father into the presence of the great statesmen of the age, among whom Scaurus then shone as a venerable old man: the youth met with a distinguished reception from them, as they recognised in him the future great man ; and he, on his side, had come to them with that longing which is felt by all generous minds, to attach himself to those who are more matured, and to purify himself after their example. Thus he idealized these men, and the impression which he had received, lasted his whole life through ; even, when an old man himself, he looked up to the men of his youth, and in this spirit he also remembers Scaurus. Sallust is reproached with malignity ; but surely he is not sinning against truth, when, filled with indignation, he is branding a guilty man for ever. Scaurus, as Sallust describes him, was on the verge of that time of life, when the vigour and energy needed for waging war are already weakened, but are still equal to ruling the state ; yet when he actually became old, he got out of the perplexing posi- tion in which he had been entangled, and he stood forth as one who had belonged to an age of gigantic minds, and having to keep up a high character, he then seems to have lived outwardly b ameless and upright. Thus Cicero knew him. The same person may at different times be quite a different being ; he may be an excel- lent citizen, and then again a bad one : I am not speak- SI 4) THE WAR AGAINST JUGURTHA. ing here of real virtue before God, but only of political virtue. This was the case, for instance, in England with Shaftesbury and others in the seventeenth cen- tury. I knew one of the most eminent men of our own day, who (with the consent indeed of his government) very indelicately availed himself of an advantage, where- as at other times he showed himself to be a true hero. The leading features in the character of Scaurus, are very great pride, very determined party spirit, and first- rate talent. That his behaviour during the war with Jugurtha is not an invention of Sallust's, may be seen from the history itself. In the commission at Utica, Scaurus was blameless ; just as in former times. After Adherbal's downfall, the consul L. Calpurnius Bestia wished to enrich himself by an African war, or at all events to be able to sell a peace; he therefore joined with some lovers of justice in moving that Jugurtha should be brought to punish- ment, and he also managed to be sent out to Africa with that commission. The war began in good earnest ; but negotiations were soon set on foot, Jugurtha having convinced Bastia and Scaurus that this was more for their advantage. He remained indeed in possession of his kingdom ; but to save appearances, he surrendered himself in fidem popvli Romani; so that the senate only had to ratify the peace, the faedus being changed into a clientela. He delivered up the deserters, thirty elephants, and much cattle ; and he bound himself to pay several instalments of money. Yet the whole thing was but a vile farce. Instead of the deserters being sent to Rome, where they were to be put to death, they were allowed to run away ; and the elephants were returned to Jugurtha for money. This treaty, however, raised such an outcry at Rome, that a bold tribune of the name of C. Memmius got the people to have the matter inquired into; and L. Cassius, who at that time was honoured as the justest of men, was commissioned per- sonally to investigate the case in Africa itself. Cassius, THE WAR AGAINST JUGURTHA. 315 beyond all doubt, was a man of very high rank, — a pa- trician, * but not identified with any party : being him- self pure in a corrupt time, he condemned without any respect of persons. Cassius' word of honour was of such weight, that Jugurtha on the strength of it deemed himself quite safe in going to Rome, and publicly mak- ing his appearance there. Here we find Jugurtha — and this is a marked feature in the whole of his deportment — wavering between his own boldness and the feeling that he was not able to withstand the power of Rome. He was on the point of giving up his accomplices ; but a tribune of the people had been bribed to forbid his speaking, just as he was getting up in the assembly of the people. Thus the authority of the tribunes had be- come powerful for evil, but powerless for good. During his stay in Rome, Jugurtha caused another descendant of Masinissa, Massiva, a young Numidian, who likewise happened to be there at the very time, and to whom the consul Sp. Albinus had held out a hope of the succes- sion, to be murdered : after this he fled from the city, leaving his sureties behind. The consul Albinus and the senate now declared the negotiations for peace to have been null and void ; yet the guilty still remained unpunished. The war was renewed in Africa, but in a lukewarm manner. The consul Sp. Albinus, who had the chief command, wished for war ; but his arrange- ments were bad. As he had to return to Rome for the consular elections, he intrusted the command to his brother Aulus, who behaved in such a bungling way that he was surrounded by the enemy. Jugurtha now plied the army with his money, and not only mere foreigners, but even Roman tribunes were bribed ; so that when the time came for attacking Albinus, he was utterly overpowered, and bis camp was taken. He was forced • In vol. I, p, 258, and R. H. II, 195, the Cassii are considered as pie; beians : our passage dates from 1826-7 ; the former one from 1828-9.— —Germ. Edit. 316 Q. oasciLius METELLUS. to make a disgraceful treaty, which, however, was dis- owned at Rome. Things could now no longer be hushed up. Metellus got the command with ample forces to carry on the war. Three qucesitores were now to be appointed, and thus Scaurus was in danger of being involved in the enquiry : but, according to Sallust's account, he played his cards so well, that, instead of being impeached, he himself became one of the qucesitores, and proceeded against the accused only so far as seemed consistent with his own safety. A great number were condemn- ed, and the slow vengeance for the murder of C. Grac- chus now reached L. Opimius. It is inconceivable how Cicero is mistaken with regard to the latter : no man's judgment indeed ought to be implicitly followed. Those who fell at that time, were certainly all of them guilty. Unfortunately, we have no exact knowledge of these qucestiones; but thus much is certain, that the optimates, who wanted to pass themselves off as being the best, received by the exposure of the infamy of some among them, a blow from which they never recovered. The equites, as judges, now took a decided part against the senators : it would have been most interesting for us, if we could have had further details about it. Here begins the split which afterwards led to the civil war between the factions of Marius and Sylla. Calpurnius Bestia was likewise condemned ; of the fate of others we know very little. Metellus was the son of Macedonicus, and has the surname of Numidicus. He is one of those characters which people are very apt to see in a wrong light : — a noble-hearted man, he cannot be called without qualifi- cation ; he was, though a plebeian, fully imbued with the prejudices and jealousies of the nobility. From a child, he had come to the conviction that the govern- ment ought to be honestly carried on : he was the pa- tron of men of low degree who were making their way Q. (XECILIUS METELLUS. 317 upwards ; for he loved merit, so long as it kept within bounds, and did not aspire to the very highest place. This accounts for his behaviour to Marius, to whom at first he showed kindness ; for as soon as Marius stood for the consulship, he was so blinded by his rage that he became his enemy. To this very day, one meets among the high English nobility with men like Metel- lus, who look upon the privileges of their order as the first inviolable rights, and whenever offences committed by any of their own body come to light, will step in with their protection to prevent an exposure. Thus the remarkable character of Metellus becomes quite clear : he was estimable for the integrity of his motives, but utterly incapable of being just. He spurned all the of- fers of Jugurtha against whom he used his own Punic, arts, so that that prince was obliged to disarm entirely as the price of hopes which were never fulfilled ; and when Jugurtha wished actually to buy himself off from the ruin which he clearly saw before his eyes, Metellus put forth conditions which would have rendered him quite defenceless. At last, Metellus demanded, that he should appear in person ; this Jugurtha refused to do, and the war broke out afresh. Metellus carried it on for two years ; and though he was sometimes worsted, he deserves very great praise for the manner in which he overcame the difficulties which he had to encounter : several of his undertakings are some of the most bril- liant in history. Jugurtha, on the whole, avoided pitched battles; he risked an engagement only once, and then he was beaten. We now again see that mix- ture of cowardice and boldness which there was in him, and his inability to meet his fate. He wanted to sur- render to Metellus, and had already given up all his arms, all his elephants, and two hundred thousand pounds of silver ; but when he was to yield up his own person, he withdrew into the wilds of mount Atlas, hav- ing now stripped himself of all his resources. Thus the war was protracted in spite of the efforts of Metellus, 318 C. MARIUS. and the opinion gained ground in Rome, that he had purposely allowed it to drag on : yet there was no rea- son for doubting his disinterestedness and incorrupti- bility. He was a great general and statesman, and his personal character stood high ; but his pretensions were unbearable. They may indeed have been the ruin of the country: that fearful irritability which we after- wards find in Marius, would never have been roused, had not the optimates done everything in their power to crush him. On the subject of Marius' birth, even the ancients were not agreed. Some of them make him out to have been of a very low origin ; others (Velleius Paterculus) place Mm somewhat higher : certain it is that his an- cestors were clients of a municipal family in Arpinum, from which, however, it does not follow that they were serfs. The name is jQscan, and it is likely that his fami- ly had come from Campania to Arpinum, where it had entered into the clientship of the Herennii. At all events, he was poor, and had served as a private soldier, and before that, even as a day labourer. His extraor- dinary qualities must have displayed themselves very soon : at an early age, he was known at Rome as an able centurion ; and when he applied for the military tribuneship, he was elected with great applause. Other- wise, it was very seldom indeed — particularly in those later times — that any one who had been in the ranks, was ever raised to the higher military commands. Marius rose without the help of any connexions or relations ; yet he must have made some money, or he could not have stood for the aedileship, on which occasion he failed. Notwithstanding this repulse, he got the prae- torship, which office he discharged very creditably ; and though the oligarchs even then gave him trouble by charging him with ambitus, he kept his ground against them. In was in those days already most common for candidates to spend money ; and yet every one would try and fix this charge upon his opponents, that he c. MARIUS. 319 might drive them out of the field. He was now with the army of Metellus as a legatus: for the higher em- ployments were by no means permanent. For a homo novus to become a praetor, was at that time not at all a thing unheard of; but that he should have risen to the consular dignity, was, according to Sallust's descrip- tion, all but an impossibility. Of the six praetors more- over, four, as a matter of course, could not become con- suls : the children of a praetor, however, were not homi- nes novi. Marius distinguished himself in Numidia. He was then indeed an elderly man already, even as I am now (1829), somewhat past fifty. He was moreover super- stitious. We here meet for the first time with a super- stition which is to be traced to the East ; for he had with him a Syrian (or perhaps a Jewish) fortune-teller of the name of Martha, by whose prophecies he allowed himself to be guided. As he was offering a sacrifice, he beheld an omen by which every thing that was highest in the state was promised him ; and this gave him courage to stand for the consulship. Metellus advised him not to do it, tried to keep him back, and thwarted him in an underhand way ; nay, when Marius declared that he would positively become a candidate, he forgot himself so far as to tell him, that he need not forsooth be in such a hurry ; and that indeed it would be still time enough for him to be thrown out, when his own son should stand. That son was then twenty years old, and by the leges annales no one could be a consul until he was about forty years of age. Marius never forgot this : he felt bitterly offended, and caused the people to be canvassed by his friends in Rome, on which Metellug seemingly yielded, in the hope that he would be too late : for he gave him leave of absence but twelve days before the elections. But Marius by dint of wonderful exertions reached the coast ; and the wind being fair, he arrived in Rome, even making his appearance before 320 C. MARIUS. the day of the election, and was almost unanimously chosen consul. Whilst C. Gracchus is unjustly called a demagogue, this name may well be given to Marius, who was one in every sense of the word ; for he would fawn upon the lowest rabble as others would upon powerful individuals, and delight in appearing to the common people as if he were one of them. He was not suited to those times : for he had a sensitive pride which was continually wounded, and thus he fell into those unhappy ways which have disgraced him. Moreover, it was then look- ed upon as indispensable for a man of rank to be well versed in the manners, and literature, and language of the Greeks ; just as those of the French were deemed essential in Germany, even to the days of my youth. Old Cato learned Greek only late ; yet he learned it, and was well read in the literature of his own country. Unlike him, Marius did not cling to the old traditions which began already to vanish away, and he disdained modern refinement, because he knew nothing of it : he spoke Greek, it is true, which at that time was quite necessary in society, but he despised it. His honesty was without a stain : for though his great wealth must have been acquired in war, he was held to be a vir sanc- tus, since he had not robbed the commonwealth as the greater part of his contemporaries had done. From this we may judge of the state of morals then. Fabricius, Curius, and others, who centuries before had likewise been called sancti, were also poor. Marius was a first- rate general, the consciousness of which carried him high : he was great in drawing up an army, especially in the day of battle, unrivalled in his mode of conduct- ing a campaign, and just as skilful in encampment. But he had few friends : the leading features of his charac- ter were bitterness and hatred, and he was cruel and unamiable. Fate had raised him up to save Rome, the degeneracy of which is to be charged upon those who C. MARIUS. 321 crushed and irritated so extraordinary, so distinguished a man. Metellus was an ordinary general : had he ever had to face Marius in the field, he would at once have been beaten. Marius, on the contrary, was no common commander ; besides the greatest foresight in making his preparations, he was gifted with unbounded energy to execute, and with a quickness of eye which could see everything at a glance. It was his hatred against the so-called optimates, which, perhaps without his being aware of it, led him into his many unrighteous acts against them. The tribunes of the people at Rome now moved that the province of Numidia should, out of turn, be the first assigned ; and as this was unanimously agreed to by the people, Marius got the chief command. Metel- lus again showed his littleness of mind. Not being able to brook the sight of his successor, he stole away, leaving the army to his legate Rutilius, an excellent man, who afterwards became a victim to party spirit, as he went over to the other side : for, as hitherto the oligarchical faction had shown itself malignant, so did the democrats in their turn, now that they had got the upperhand. Ma- rius ended the war with Jugurtha in less than two years, having displayed the greatest ability and boldness. Sal- lust particularly mentions, how in the siege of Capsa, he put to flight the enemy's cavalry, retons also be- longed to the same race. Whether any Cymri dwelt in Ulster, is problematical : the Picts were likewise of the Cymric stock ; and so were the Belgians : for though these were not unmingled with Gaels, the Cymri must have been predominant among them. On their great migration, they went in the fourth or fifth century to the borders of the Ukraine, and ruled as Celto- Scythians « Cont ?ol I, p. 367, CIMBRI AND TEUTONES. 323 as far as the banks of the Dnieper, or even beyond : there they were called Galatians. Owing to circum- stances of which we have no exact knowledge, very likely in consequence of the advance of the Sarmatians or Sclavonians, they were driven out of their settle- ments,— and they fell back upon their countrymen in Moldavia, Wallachia, Hungary, and the neighbouring countries : they first of all expelled the Bastarnians ; then the Scordiscans and Tauriscans ; and in 639, be- fore the outbreak of the war with Jugurtha, they threw themselves upon the country of the Noricans in Car- niola and Carinthia. Here, on the frontier of Italy, were the abodes of the Carnians and other Gallic tribes, which, though not subject to the Romans, were of course in a state of dependence, as is always the case with small nations when they are neighbours of great ones. The Cimbri made their appearance on the banks of the middle Danube and in Bohemia, and attacked the Boians; but they were repelled. It must have been while they were on the middle Danube, that they fell upon every people which they met with, and leagued themselves with the Teutones. These, as even their name seems to show, were of German stock, quite as certainly as the Cimbri were of Gallic race in the wid- est sense of the word (thus many Gallic words are found in the Cymric language, and there is a general affinity between them, although Gauls and Cymri did not under- stand each other). The Teutones may, like the Cimbri, have been chased out of the East by the advance of the Sarmatians: if what we are told from the travels of Pytheas be true, and he fell in with the Teutones on the eastern coast of Prussia, it is likely that they were pushed on from northern Poland by the Sarmatians. In Gaul they clearly appear as the allies of the Cim- brians, and the names of the leaders betoken a Gallic and a German people. When now they rushed forth from Noricum, either together or in separate hosts ; the Romans came to the help of the Carnians, and the con- 324 WAR WITH THE sul Cn. Papirius Carbo, in all likelihood a son of him who had been driven by Crassus to commit suicide, was defeated and killed near Noreia by the Cimbrians, and his whole army perished with him. But the barbarians did not follow up their victory, nor did they penetrate into Italy ; but, what is very strange, they overran the bleak provinces of Austria and Bavaria north of the Alps, which were then inhabited by Celts, and thus went on to Gaul. At the general break up which ensued, they were also joined by the Tigurini, who were Gauls from Helvetia, and by the Ambrones : whence these last came, is more than we can say ; most likely, they were Ligurians from the Alps. All of these moved into Gaul, bringing with them a. countless number of waggons with women, children, and booty; and now the four peoples, sometimes in one huge host, at other times apart, burst upon the civilized world. It is difficult to say where they defeated either Silanus or Scaurus ; for our accounts are scanty beyond belief, as Livy fails us here, and the seventeen books of Dio Cassius which we have not, were also no longer to be found by Zonaras. It might be inferred from one statement, that the Ro- mans advanced as far as the neighbourhood of Rochelle, between Poitou and the Garonne. They had to suffer another defeat under the consul L. Cassius Longinus, near the lake of Geneva, and they purchased their re- treat with the loss of half their baggage. Although they wished to protect the Transalpine Gauls, all their efforts were unsuccessful. The devastation of Gaul by these wars was one of the most dreadful calamities ever known : the whole of the country bounded by the Rhone, even from the Rhine to the Pyrenees, was ravaged, which may account for its weakened state in the days of Caesar; the towns were taken and laid waste, and the inhabitants cruelly treated. Of all the Gallic tribes, the Belgians alone could stand their ground. The worst defeat which the Romans sustained, was on the banks of the Rhone, the year after the consulship of CIMBRI AND TEUTONES. 325 Marius, under the consul Cn. Mailius and the proconsul Caepio. That eighty thousand Romans and Italians were killed, does not look at all historical; — if that number be correct, many Gallic auxiliaries must have been with them; — but the statement, according .to Oro- sius, seems to rest merely on the authority of Valerius Antias. At all events, both of the Roman armies were completely routed. But most providentially for Rome, when Gaul had everywhere been ransacked, the Cimbri and Teutones, either deterred by the Alps, or perhaps because they also feared the Romans more than they did any other people, turned towards Spain, which country they overran, as the Romans were utterly un- able to protect it. Even those places which surrendered to them were horribly treated ; and this led the Celti- berians to stand sieges in which they were at last driven to feed on dead bodies, rather than fall into the hands of barbarians. This resolute spirit made the invaders give up all thoughts of conquering Spain, and they re- treated back again into Gaul. The devastation of Gaul took place at the time when Metellus was conducting the war against Jugurtha ; the expedition into Spain happened during Marius' second and third consulships. For the reverses which had be- fallen the Roman arms, had now caused Marius to be made consul for the third time ; even his enemies wish- ed him to be chosen, as they saw that no one else could save the state. Every army but that of Numidia had been annihilated ; and to train the new soldiers, was the great task which Marius alone was able to achieve, he being himself as thoroughly practised a soldier as he de- sired every one to be. Marius is beyond all doubt the author of the great change in the Roman tactics, as may be known from Caesar : this supposition is already to be found in those who have written before us, Colonel Guichard in particular. And moreover this change could only have been the work of a man who always adapted his system to the wants of his age. Down to S2G "WAR WITH THE Marius' days, even during the Numidian wars, we read Q{ pritwipes, triarii, and hastati; of Marius' time itself we have indeed no history of any note, written in Latin, though we have an exact knowledge of Caesar's legion, in which there are neither hastati, nor principes, nor triarii, but only pilani; the lance is done away with, and the pilum and sword alone are used ; the men are no more drawn up in maniples, the legion being now formed in a line which was ten deep, with a proportion- ate reserve ; and when there are several lines of battle, these do not affect the disposition, as they likewise were not placed in maniples, en echelons, but in parallels, one behind the other. The legion is divided into sixty cen- turies (not as in the earliest times, into five cohorts, each having thirty centuries of thirty men) ; and its strength besides is raised from 4,500 to 6,000 men. The light troops are detached, the legion being no longer a brigade, but a very strong regiment, all of the same arm ; and the cavalry is not a part of the legion. An- other, and very essential difference, is, that Marius — and he was very much blamed for it — in levying the troops did not now follow the old system by which all who had less than 12,500 asses, and more than 4,500, were set aside for the reserve ; nor yet the later plan by which every one who had even 1,000 sesterces (400 de- narii), was enlisted in the line, and those who were be- low that standard could only serve in the fleet ; but he took every able-bodied man, although he might not be above beggary. This was indeed very bad accord- ing to the notions of the old times, when there were good reasons for employing in the defence of the coun- try none but those who might be deemed to have an in- terest in upholding the constitution. But in those days, there were no standing armies; whereas, when once these began to be kept, it was less hard for a man who had nothing to remain for years in the provinces, than it was for an only son who possessed property: thus what had formerly been quite right, had ceased to be CIMBRI AND TEUTONES. 327 80, now that circumstances were changed. On the whole, though I am by no means blind to the grievous faults of Marius, — nay, if you will, to his vices, — it cer- tainly shows a want of sense, to speak of him as if it had been better for the republic that he had never been born. That he was worthy of his high renown, is un- deniable ; and though his cruelties are not to be ex- cused, he was indeed a great man, and one ought to try to understand and account for his failings. Two such different men, as Cicero and Caesar, had a great fondness for Marius : Caesar, when a boy, loved with all his soul the husband of his aunt Julia ; and Cicero, even in spite of his party, felt proud of being, as an Arpinate, the countryman of Marius. Marius now employed his second and third consul- ships in forming a new army. Happily for Rome, the Cimbri were all this while in Spain. Eleven years had now passed since their first appearance ; so that we see how quickly the tide of emigration which no bounds could hitherto stay, set in towards the west : had they succeeded in Spain, it is very possible that they would have gone to Africa. Marius had to find soldiers as he best could : what was left of the old army, was shatter- ed and demoralized, all but the troops which had re- turned from Numidia; he was therefore obliged to train his raw levies for the field, by mingling them with the few veterans who had won many a battle : in his fourth consulship, his army was formed. In the third already, he had been in the south of France near the Rhone, probably on the frontiers of Provence and Dauphine, between Aries and Avignon ; and that part of the coun- try, which was as near the enemy as could be, he had chosen as his exercising ground, that he might force his men to keep with all their might on the alert : those who were not able to stand the work, sank under it ; the rest were so much the better soldiers. As the Rhone, like all the rivers of the Mediterranean, has its mouth choked up with silt, he dug in all haste a canal to open 328 WAR WITH THE a free communication with the sea. During his fourth consulship he advanced towards the spot where the Isere and the Rhone meet, expecting that the Cimbri and Teutones would return from Spain : it was thought that they would cross the Alps, and follow the same road which Hannibal had once chosen. All feelings of hatred in the Gauls, had of course died away. If it be true that Marius was obliged to use intrigues to get this consulship, it is a very bad case, and a proof of the blind infatuation of the oligarchy. The barbarians had no wish to attack Marius, and so they separated : the Cimbri went round the northern range of the Alps, that they might invade Italy from the other side, where it was more easily entered ; the Teutones remained in Gaul. For what reason Marius should have now retreated from Valence to Aquae Sex- tiae, our scanty sources do not tell us : probably it was for the purpose of getting provisions. The Cimbrians passed with jeers by the camp of Marius, and went round Switzerland: for between the Pennine and the Tridentine Alps, there was not yet at that time any practicable road for such hosts of men with their wag- gons and baggage : the only way was that across the little St. Bernard, which they could not take on account of the Romans ; single troops may have gone by the St. Uotthard and the Spliigen. The Romans had opposed to them, near Trent in Italian Tyrol, another army under the command of the consul Q. Lutatius Catulus, fi man who was the very opposite of Tuarms, as he wa3 one of those persons of high rank in that day who had had a Greek education: according to Cicero, he was even a fair author, and he left behind him memoirs in Greek, as was then much the fashion among people of refinement at Rome, Latin prose not being yet cultivat- ed by great writers ; just as Frederic the Great wrote his memoirs in French. Incalculable is the loss to us of the books of Livy which treat of this period, as we do not know any thing more about it than we do of CIMBRI AND TEUTONES. 329 earlier centuries ; in fact, we know less of the gigantic struggles against the Cimbri and Teutones, than we do of the national emigrations and the wars against the barbarians in the beginning of the fifth century. Here we find Orosius on the whole an unadulterated source, and now and then we have to make shift with Florus ; all the epitomizers, however, as Orosius, Eutropiue, Florus, are full of discrepancies when compared toge- ther, though they every one of them drew from Livy. Quite independent of these is the account of Plutarch, which is the most detailed narrative we have of the €imbric war. When the Cimbri were gone away, the Teutones and Ambrones followed in the track of Marius: whither the Tigurini went, we cannot tell. To judge from an expression of the epitomizers, the barbarians — a fact which Plutarch does not mention — must have taken the camp of Marius ; but this could not have been the one near the ground where the battle was fought, as from the march towards it, and the whole of Marius' dispo- sition, we may see that he had been stopped when re- treating. He had therefore to encamp in a spot where there was no water, and the soldiers were obliged to go out armed and fetch it from a distant well ; so that they asked to be led out to fight. Marius wished first to en- trench himself, as his foes were quite close, and every- thing was against him ; yet he could not carry out his intention, the distress being so great that the camp- followers in despair went to some water which was in the neighbourhood of the enerny. Here the Ambrones attacked them, on which the soldiers came to their help : the Ligurians first set out, and then cohort after cohort hastened up, without any orders from Marius. Thus an engagement was brought on, in which, strange to say, the Teutones took no share whatever : perhaps they had not yet come up. Even in this conflict, a brilliant vic- tory was gained, most of the Ambrones being destroy- ed ; notwithstanding which, the Romans, who were with- 330 WAR WITH THE out entrenchments, now passed an anxious night in which they were busily throwing up works. The next battle was not fought on the following day, as had been expected, but on the day after ; most likely because the Teutones and the rest of the Ambrones had only just now arrived. Marius laid all his plans with the talent of a true general, and he sent M. Claudius Marcellus— a man whose family was always distinguished, he being undoubtedly a grandson of that worthy Marcellus so well known in the Iberian war, who had five times been consul — with a division of allies, as it would seem, to attack the enemy's rear. Yet even before this, the fury of the Teutones had spent itself in vain against the steadfastness and dogged resolution of the Romans, and the more so as it was summer : for the men of the South, owing to their more muscular frame, are able to stand both heat and frost better than others : the Italians in Napoleon's Russian campaign, suffered much less than the northern nations did. And therefore, as one might easily believe, the natives of Rome bore the glowing heat of the sun much better than the Teutones. The Romans, who were posted on a hill, awaited the onset of the barbarians ; these were beaten back, and when they "were endeavouring to rally in the plain, Marcellus fell upon them from behind. Part of them tried to make their escape, and were overpowered and slain by the Gallic tribes. The prince of the Teutones was taken prisoner by the Sequani, and the remnant of his army retreated within their rampart of waggons; but the Romans now broke in, and nearly the v:hclc of the na- tion was destroyed, some very few only being made slaves. Half of the danger was now warded off. Soon after- wards, the Cimbri burst upon Italy through Tyrol and the Alps of Trent ; and this was not from any fault of Catulus, but it was altogether owing to their overwhelm- ing numbers, and the terror which they spread far and wide. The account in Florus of the manner in which CIMBRI AND TEUTOXES. 331 the Cimbri opened the way for themselves, is quite childish ; just as if these had been the dullest of savages, and had wanted to stop the tide of the Adige with their hands : this shows what a homo umbraticus that writer was. There are indeed some fords in the Adige, and in passing such a river one makes the cavalry cross higher up, and somewhat lower down a close column of infan- try, which will break the force of a moderate stream. This the Cimbri may also have tried to do, thinking perhaps that with their huge bodies they would be able to stem the flood ; but in the Adige, as it is near Leg- nano, such a thing is impossible. Afterwards they are said to have thrown trees into the river to dam it up ; which is also incredible. They wished rather to have a bridge and to destroy that of the Romans by means of their floats of timbers, and this they succeeded in doing. The Romans being posted at each end of the bridge, on both sides of the stream, one of their two divisions was cut off from the other, and was obliged to surrender to the Cimbri; but these, with unwonted humanity, let it go free. This, however, is true, that in crossing the most impassable parts of the Alps, they glided on their large shields, as on sleighs, down the steepest declivities. At this irruption, Catulus fell back as far as the Po, or yet beyond it : the whole country north of that river was laid waste; the towns of Mantua, Verona, Brescia, which were left to the protec- tion of their walls, defended themselves ; but the open places were destroyed. From the winter to the follow- ing summer, the Cimbri most unaccountably remained on that side of the Po. Marius heard in Gaul of the irruption of the barba- rians, and he ordered his army to march to Genua in Li- guria (as it would seem), and went himself to Rome. Here every one was now full of admiration for him ; and the feeling that he was the only man who could save the country, was become so general, that even the oligarchs were for his being made consul for the fifth time. People S32 WAR WITH THE were so eager to gain his goodwill, that they offered him a triumph ; but this he declined until he should have de- stroyed the Cimbri, and his assurance communicated it- self to every one. He accordingly united his army with that of Catulus, who had remained in command as pro- consul. They both of them now passed the Po with some- what more than fifty-two thousand men. It is said that the Cimbri knew nothing of the defeat of the Teutones ; which is a downright absurdity, as it is impossible that from autumn to the end of July, they should not have got any news. It was surely for this very reason, that they asked Marius for land and places of abode, as they felt that half of their power had been overthrown : if they also demanded this for their brethren, these must have been the Tigurini. Whether the Cimbri now wished to secure the passes to Gaul, that they might keep the road over the little St. Bernard open for any emergency, and this was why they came to Vercellae, is uncertain ; yet notwithstanding all the variations in the readings, there seems to be no doubt that a battle was fought near Vercelli on the declivity of the Alps : for one cannot see how any body should have thought of placing it in this corner of Lombardy. Writers call the spot Campi Raudii, The battle, contrary to the Roman custom, was announced three days beforehand, and on the third day before the calends of the Sextilis (July 29th as the calendar was then), it was fought. So much time had the Cimbri spent in their ravages since the beginning of winter, in this unwholesome aguish coun- try, where the water is so bad : epidemics also had al- ready broken out among them. On the day of the bat- tle, Marius put the army of Ca*tulus in the centre, dis- posing his own on the two wings : the account of it, which is found in Plutarch only, is so confused, that nothing distinct can be made out of it. It is incredible that the Cimbri should have formed a great square, each side of which was three quarters of a (German) mile long, the men in the outside ranks having, as we are CIMBRI AND TEUTONES. 333 told, their girdles linked together with chains : such a mass would amount to many millions of men. Marius is said to have so placed his troops that the sun and the wind were in the faces of the barbarians ; such a thing may be history, or it may be fiction. Catulus had to stand the brunt of the battle ; at least the fight was hot- test where he was : and yet it was only a proof of party spirit, when people disputed whether it was to Marius or to Catulus that the victory was due ; for it seems be- yond all doubt that Marius decided the battle in the wings, and thus had the chief merit of it. The Cim- brians fled within their rampart of waggons, where even the women and children fought, and killed themselves at last : a great many were taken prisoners, as the Alps blocked up their retreat. In short, every thing belong- ing to the Cimbri which had crossed these mountains, was cut off, all but the tribe of the Aduatici, who had settled hereabouts,* on the Lower Rhine, where they must therefore have had fixed abodes at one time. As a reward for his unexampled achievements, Ma- rius had now his sixth consulship given him. He led the most brilliant triumph which any general had ever had; but even then he already showed how much his head was turned, as he entered the senate in his triumphal garments. There was a belief that some one before him had been six times consul ; but this can no longer be ascertained, as the ancients themselves could not tell. Perhaps Valerius Corvus was six times con- sul ; it may, however, have been, that in what is ac- counted his sixth consulship, one of his family was mis- taken for him. Marius was called the third founder of Rome after Romulus and Camillus. But this consul- ship, although Marius at last became useful to the state, had such dismal consequences, as to make one wish that he had died on the day of his triumph : then his memo- ry would have been glorious and blessed, and he would have thrown even Scipio into the shade. • Bonn is here spoken of.— TRANSL. 334) MARIUS' SIXTH CONSULSHIP. MARIUS SIXTH CONSULSHIP. L. APULEIUS SATURNINUS. C. SEBVILIUS OLATJCIA. MARIUS was not the man who could play his part well in quiet, peaceful times ; and yet Rome was hastening towards dissolution in a way which compelled him to act. There are very many kinds of courage, as the greatest men have owned ; there is a courage with re- gard to danger, which either looks death in the face with indifference, or forgets it altogether in the excitement of action. This is a fine quality in itself; but. it does not follow, that the motive for its display should be as noble : he alone in whom this constancy is allied to a pure mind, and who is conscious of a lofty aim, will en- joy with it the full sense of personal freedom, and be enabled to achieve great things. Many are wanting in this sort of prowess, who yet possess a determined moral courage, owing to which they hold themselves above the opinion of those around them, it being all the same to them whether they be misjudged or not ; others, who in the hour of danger show the courage of lions, are ex- ceedingly timid in this respect, and afraid of acting up to a conviction which has been branded by the world's anathema. It was in this latter sense that Marius was weak ; for if one was to say that he let himself be used as a tool by the men who exercised such influence dur- ing his sixth consulship, this would be making him out to have been a most pitiful wretch ; whereas it is the clue to his conduct, that he was at one time afraid of the demagogues, and at another of the senate, a deplo- rable, although partial, weakness of a great man who had no greatness of character. Marius had joined himself with a sad knave, to get his sixth consulship. This was L. Apuleius Saturni- nus, who, undeservedly enough, is often named with the Gracchi, although there cannot be a wider interval than L. APULEIUS SATURNINUS. 335 that between them and Saturninus. He was a man like Catiline, one indeed of whom the like is seldom seen ; for though one can understand how ambition will lead people blindfold into acts of dangerous daring, yet how a man could have taken in his head to be so mad, is all but incomprehensible. It would seem that his was a revolutionary mind ; that he formed no clear notion of what things would come to, being utterly regardless of institutions and government, and only thinking of vio- lence and confusion. He had sprung from one of the richest and most eminent plebeian families ; just as in the French revolution, men of the first nobility put themselves at the head of the rabble. I do not recol- lect whether it is of him, or of Servilius Glaucia, that Cicero says, that no one had been gifted with a more malignant wit : * it was by this means that they manag- ed the people. He had started in life as an aristocrat. There were at that time eight quaestorships, which were given partly to consulars, and partly to other persons. They were places with an income attached to them, one of them being the qucestura Ostiensis, which had the charge of the granaries at Rome. Saturninus had, as quaestor, availed himself of the privilege of pecidatus taken by the men of rank ; but when the tables were suddenly turned, and the oligarchs were no longer able to screen the sins of their own body, owing to an honest party having been formed from both factions under the lead of the straight-forward C. Memmius, he got liable to the punishment of being deposed, and so he threw himself into the arms of the mob : it was a conspiracy of the dregs of the upper and middle classes. He now became a tribune of the people, and behaved in the most savage manner towards the very first men, for instance, the censors and others. When, on his standing the » Cicero does not seem to say this quite so explicitly in Brutus (8, 224. Longe autem post natos homines improbissimus C. Servilius Glau- cia, sed peracutus et callidus imprimisque ridiculus — homo simillimug Atneniensis Hvperboli, cujus improbitatem veteres Atticorum comce- dise notaverunt. Conf. du Orat it, 61, 249 ; 65, 263.— Germ. Edit. 336 C. SERVILIUS GLAUCIA. second time for the tribuneship, another candidate, A. Nonius was set up against him, he so hounded on the rabble against that unfortunate man, that they mur- dered him ; and thus he made himself by force a tribune again. The magistrates had no more any authority ; those who had the power, did just what they liked. His accomplice was C. Servilius Glaucia, like him a man of very high rank, not a freedman, as might be in- ferred from his name : in a similar manner, a Scipio was nicknamed Serapio, from an actor to whom he bore a likeness. What these two really wanted, is hard to say : if their madness went even to utter recklessness, it might be assumed that they aimed at a tyranny for one of them ; but if they believed that Marius would allow such a thing, this were just as great an insanity as that of the drunkard in Shakspeare's Tempest. We must deem many of the men of that time to have been down- right madmen. Of Robespierre also, it can never be said what purpose he had ; — very likely he had none whatever. Thus also one of these men wanted to rule, no matter how, and for what end. When now Apuleius was tri- bune, Marius was consul for the sixth time. It was then that the former really began his career as a legis- lator, trying to win the favour of the people by a set of seditious motions : his aims were quite different from those which in earlier days were called seditious ; he was striving to establish a tyranny, a design indeed which only a general, like Sylla or Caesar, could have succeeded in carrying out. The legislation of Saturni- nus, however, has come down to us very obscure : thus much we know, that a most sweeping agrarian law was one of its main features, and that he changed the giving out of corn into a regular distribution of alms. It would seem as if the whole of the lands to be divided by his Lex agraria, were situated in Transpadane Gaul; for that they should have been in France itself, is not like- ly. He is said also to have made a Lex judiciaria. He now flattered Marius in every possible way. He wanted MARIUS. S3? to found colonies, and the coloni were to consist of Ro- mans and Italians : for as the Italian allies in the army of Marius, had also very much distinguished themselves, Apuleius favoured them as much as the Romans, and this was what exasperated many of the poorer Roman citizens against the law. Marius was moreover to have the power of giving in each of these colonies the Roman citizenship to three Italian allies, a thing which indeed went beyond all bounds of civil authority. Yet though at that time this was still something quite monstrous, as it trenched upon some of the rights of the sovereign people, no umbrage was taken afterwards when an im- perator bestowed the citizenship. These laws were op- posed, both on account of their author and their evident tendency, by all right-minded men, even by those who in former days had with all their might withstood the oligarchy ; and likewise by the broken-down oligarchs themselves, who now wanted no more than what was reasonable. Hence it was that C. Memmius became the object of the rage of the seditious, though twelve years before, when tribune, he had called upon the people to quell the oligarchy : he had only behaved, as he ever did, like an honest man. Owing to the Hortensian law, the new lex agraria did not require the sanction of the senate. That that body, however, might not afterwards attack it, Saturninus demanded that the senators should swear to it five days after its adoption by the tribes : and when this was de- bated in the senate, Marius at first declared, that it ought not to be done ; that he would not take the oath, and that he hoped that every well-disposed person would follow his example. It was thought that he acted thus from craftiness, to draw in his enemies, particularly Metellus, to refuse the oath likewise : nor is this impos- sible. But he may also have honestly meant what he said, though afterwards false friends began to work upon him by means of his unhappy dread of the mob. Cicero had the strength of mind not to allow himself to be thua 338 Q. METELLUS NUMIDICUS. overawed ; he says in a speech of his (pro Rabirio per- duett.) nihil me clamor iste commovet, eed coiisolatur, quu/n indicat esse quosdam, cives imperitos, sed non multos. Neither Plutarch nor Appiauhave thrown any light upon this subject. At the end of all the laws, there is the following formula, si quidsacri sanctique est quod non jv^ sit rogari, ejiw hac lege nihil rogatur; or else, si quid jits non esset rogarier ejiks ea lege nihilum rogatum. * These unlucky advisers now said that, if the law was not passed, blood would flow ; but that if it were passed, this clause would give protection against everything in the body of the enactment which was thus made null and void. By such casuistry as this, they got Marius to declare on the fifth day in the senate, that even if they took the oath, they would still have this loophole left them. Thus the oath was taken by Marius, and after him by all the rest, except Q. Metellus Numidi- cus, who stood out against it with a constancy truly heroic, which does him greater honour than his Numi- dian victories, and which would lead one to pardon his haughtiness to Marius. In the day of trial, he showed a resolute consistency, and Saturninus, persisting in the course which he had taken, had him dragged out of the senate by his viator-, and outlawed him (aqua et igni in- terdicebat) ; on which he went as an exile to Rhodes. The year was, passed in horrors. The stain upon Marius' character is his weakness : from henceforth he always stands in an undecided position, trimming between both factions ; and thus he saw himself dependent upon the very storms which surrounded him. As good luck would have it, these fellows carried things so far, that they brought about a fusion of parties, and Marius him- self, not wanting to have any more to do with them, was ready to declare against them. The elections for the consulship were now held, and * Cic. ad Att. III. 23. pro Ceecina 33. Walter's History of the Roman law (Getchichte des Rimisohen Rechts), 2d edit, vol. II., p. 12, notes 15 & it>.— Germ. Ed. MARIUS. 339 M. Antonius was unanimously chosen. On the follow- ing day, it seemed certain that C. Memmius would be elected : he was one of the most energetic and right- minded men of that age, being probably the tribune in Jugurtha's time, or if not the same, at least a very near kinsman of his. Against this candidate, who was all but returned, Glaucia and Saturninus raised a tumult : they did not, however, venture to have him assailed in the open market-place ; but when he fled into a booth, he was murdered in it. This was too bad to be borne ; and Marius was applied to, who when he received the command from the senate, ut videret 'M quid detriments respublica caperet, resolved to uphold the cause of order against the outrages of miscreants : he now called upon, the equites and all respectable citizens. In this peril, it was seen how the great might likewise in other times have warded off many things, had they only had the spirit to make a stand. When the rebels found that all were turning against them, they withdrew to the Capi- tol, and there they were besieged. Marius now showed, himself a good general. The clivus was taken, and the culprits sheltered themselves within the strong walls of the Capitoline temple, which it was looked upon as a crime to storm. As the water was conveyed thither by the pipes of the aqua Marcia, Marius ordered them to be cut off; so that the besieged must have perished from hunger and thirst. That most ancient well, there- fore, which had supplied the Romans with water in the days of the Gallic invasion, must already at this time have been in the same state that it is now: it is alto- gether neglected, and every kind of filth is thrown into it. Glaucia was for setting fire to the temple, and thus dying ; but the others, who had hopes of saving their lives, would not do this, and they surrendered at discre- tion. The most guilty were shut up in the Curia Hos- tilia, that they might be brought to justice. Yet either there was a change of feeling in the populace, or else the government, not to bring upon themselves the odium of 3-40 M. LIVIUS DRUSUS. putting so many men of rank to death, got up a sham riot : the roof of the Curia was scaled, and from thence the rebels were slain by the rioters. Marius' conduct now reconciled to him men's minds again ; he retraced some of his steps, and even agreed to have Metellus re- called from banishment. Saturninus' laws seem to have been repealed, as those of Livius were afterwards. Thus ended this insurrection, which indeed is best understood by Velleius Paterculus. Marius for his own part retired into private life, and he had not a thought of making himself a tyrant. M. LIVIUS DRUSUS. THE republic was shaken to its very centre, the great point of contest being the administration of justice. The equites had so abused their power as judges, that they had public opinion against them : this was partly owing to their jealousy against the senate, and partly on account of their quarrels with individual senators in the provinces. The system of general farmers of the revenue had become more and more developed ; the companies had leases of the mines, customs, tithes, and such like things, and some of them put their money out to usury ; and they exacted from the people in the pro- vinces much more than these were bound to give. They had again their sub-farmers ; thus for instance, the pub- licans in the gospel were the agents of the publicani. The same thing is done to this day. The contract for feeding the galley slaves, was only a short time since given by the Roman government to an actress, who had a very fair price paid to her for it, so much a head be- ing allowed her ; but she sublet the contract to others, each making a trifling profit on it, down to the very last of them, and the prisoners were literally all but starved. If a consul or proconsul had ground the peo- M. LIVIUS DRUSUS. 34>1 pie in the provinces, and screened the publicani, he was safe at Rome when prosecuted ; but if a man who was just and blameless thwarted the revenue farmers in their exactions, they would revenge themselves by charging him with extortion, and get a verdict against him by means of false witnesses. This was the fate of P. Ruti- lius, and it excited universal indignation. It was im- possible to find any check for this, as each one always supported the rest. The ill blood which there was at that time between the senate and the knights, is to be found among all nations, at a certain stage of their progress, between the landowners and the monied men ; as is now the case throughout Europe. The senate, the optimates, held the great bulk of the landed property ; the equites, on the other hand, possessed the capital with which the great commer ,al speculations were carried on. More- over there v ere in Rome many circumstances under which monied property might be abused to the detri- ment of the nation, and every one who belonged to the government, was, owing to the ways in which the courts of justice were constituted, at the mercy of the equites. With regard to all these matters, Montesquieu, admi- rable as he generally is, is mistaken ; and on the whole, they have not been well explained by modern writers, though they may be brought very clearly before our mind's eye. There was now an open war against the judicial power, stirred up by the tyranny of the latter. The happy ending of the war with the Cimbri and Teutones, and the putting down of the rebellion of Sa- turninus, were followed by a season of precarious tran- quillity in which no thinking man could indeed have been blind to the real state of Rome, though the com- mon herd might have felt as if all was going on right. Yet the symptoms of its being necessary to bring the great questions of the age to a definitive decision, showed themselves more and more. Things had come to that pass, that no one seems to have thought of a .reform which could have given relief, though many 312 M. LIVIUS DRUSUS. changes were made ; and it is one of the signs of the times, that those who wanted to rise in the world, had to begin by making themselves popular, after which they went over to the opposite side. Thus it was that Cn. Domitius Ahenobarbus transferred the nomination to the pontificate and the other priestly offices, from the colleges, which used to fill up their own numbers, to the tribes ; and this was indeed so managed that the smaller half of the tribes was chosen by lot to be the electors. In the earliest times, the right of choice un- doubtedly belonged to the patricians alone ; when, how- ever, the patricians and plebeians shared these offices between them, plebeians also were added to the voters ; but afterwards, when the curies were no longer assem- bled, but were become altogether changed, it was quite natural, that the election should be left to the colleges themselves. The clause that the lesser ha*: of the tribes was to elect, seems to have been based on an old form of expression, the patricians, when they were still in existence, having been called (perhaps in the twelve tables) minor pars populi ; a different meaning was now given to it. This was the last trace which remained of the old constitution. The two questions which filled the minds of every one, were the courts of justice and the citizenship of the allies. The want of a change in the former, was strongly felt by the best men as well as the worst. Peo- ple like Mucius Scsevola, whose behaviour in the pro- vinces had been quite exemplary — he came to the Asia- tics like an angel from heaven, his conduct was really most touching — ran the greatest risk of being condemn- ed though altogether guiltless; the worst men, from quite opposite motives, had the same wish for a reform of the courts, as they would then be acquitted by the senators. The question of the citizenship of the Italians bore the closest analogy with that of the emancipation of the Roman Catholics in Ireland. Every one was well inclined to it : but then things would take an unfavour- M. LIVIUS DRUSUS SiS able turn ; a great many interests came in the way, and people again would have nothing to do with it. This is one of the most melancholy conditions in which a free state can be, when there is no knowing how to heal an evil which is manifest to every one. The allies had, even from the days of the tribuneship of Tib. Gracchus, been taught to ask for the Roman citizenship, which was their "emancipation." Thirty years had now passed since then ; they had often had great hopes, which had been blighted over and over again. Whereas in former times, the relations of Rome towards her allies had been more friendly than those of any ruling city, the most bit- ter hatred now arose. The very people who sometimes had held out hopes to the Italians, inveighed against it, when those allies put forth their claims too insolently. As far as we can judge of all the facts, nothing had been done for them with the exception of one law, by which the tithe from the ager publicus was abolished ; this, however, we only know from Appian. They now urged their demands more strongly than ever, and the right of Roman citizenship was even becoming more valuable in their eyes ; for they were getting more and more like the Romans, they had learned to speak the same lan- guage, and yet in war and in peace they were to be subject to the sway of Roman masters. In this fermen- tation, the rulers at Rome were greatly terrified ; but whenever they came to a decision, they only increased the irritation. Thus some Italians had quietly taken to themselves the right of citizenship; one of them, M. Peperna,* had even attained to the consulate and the censorship, and now it was found out that he was not law- * Valer. Maxim. Ill, 4, 5. Whether M. Peperna, who was consul in the year 622 is the same person as the consul of the year 660, wBo was censor in 666, is no more to be made out ; yet it is possible, as accord, ing to Plin. H. N. vii, 49, he reached the age of eighty-nine years. But in that case the censorship would be later than the lex Licinia ft Mucia, and the proposition would be untenable. If they be two different per- sons, the words " and the censorship " in the text are to be cast out But the matter is not quite certain, as in Valerius Maximus it is said, Uge Papia, which altogether clashes with the account as given above. —Germ. Edit. 344 M. LIVIUS DEDSUS. fully a citizen. In the general breaking up, everything at Rome fell into confusion: the calendar was in the time of Caesar, owing to arbitrary intercalations, more than eighty days behindhand ; and in a like manner, the census had been disturbed by the admission of allies, as they had assumed the character of citizens, and the cen- sors had classed them in the tribes. Now in the lex Mucia Licinia, the mad resolution was suddenly come to, of making strict inquiries into this matter, and striking off all those who were not citizens in the full- est sense of the word. This could not but have exas- perated an immense number of people : but the infatua- tion which then prevailed everywhere was inconceiv- able. By degrees however, a considerable party in the se- nate became convinced that a reform must take place ; and these were the sons of the very men who had baffled the plans of the Gracchi. They wanted to make an at- tempt to remedy the evil, the reform most urgently called for being a change in the judicial system. But this was opposed by all the immense influence of the equites, which was so great as to make even Polybius say that, in his times, few people only had nothing to do with them. To carry this out, men now thought of giving the full franchise to the Latins and allies ; and this ought to have been done at any rate. Under these circumstances, M. Livius Drusus, the son of him who during the tribuneship of Gracchus had gotten an un- happy celebrity, a man of uncommon talent, whose hands were clean, became tribune, and thought upon re- medies : all sensible people and the chief persons in the state joined with him to hinder a revolution by means of a reform. Here again much is obscure ; for in what belongs to these later ages, we are sometimes much more under the necessity of guessing, than with regard to the earlier times : then the form was a reality, being based upon numbers ; now, it had wholly lost its mean- ing. What is most likely, is that a statement of Ap- M. LIVIUS DEUSUS. 345 plan after all is correct, according to which it was the chief aim of Drusus to bring in a mixed system, and not to give back the administration of justice to the sena- tors alone, which would have caused a revolution. By the lex Servilia, the rule had already been laid down, that the judges in the courts should be divided be- tween the knights and the senators ; but this did not last long. The senate consisted of three hundred men, and to these, it is said, he meant to add three hundred knights ; from both of them combined, the jury was to be chosen by lot : for ever since the days of C. Grac- chus, there was really a system like that of trial by jury. The English antiquaries have wanted to find it even at an earlier period ; but they were wrong : in civil cases there were still single arbitri; but for political offences, and also for felony, there were qucestiones perpetuce which were analogous to the modern jury courts. It is pro- bable that by this measure of reform, one half of the jury must have been made up of senators, and the other of knights. Thus M. Livius offered to these last an advantage which they might have as a compensation, instead of the exclusive exercise of the judicial power. To this another law was tacked, by which qucestiones were to be appointed, to inflict punishment on any one who should be convicted of having given wrong judg- ment for the sake of a bribe, or from favour. What was to be the form of these qucestioiies, is more than we can tell ; in all likelihood they were to be held by the tribes. But there were very many knights, who had no wish whatever to be in the senate : it was much more agree- able to them to stand highest among those who did not belong to that body, and instead of sharing its moral responsibility, to be always able to find fault and to judge. It seems moreover that the law of Drusus did not enact that the three hundred of each class were to be kept distinct for ever ; it is more likely that this fill- ing up of the senate was only thought of as a transitory M. LIVIUS DBUSUS. measure, and that eventually the judicial power was to rest again with the senate. The knights now said that this was neither more nor less than a scheme to outwit them ; that they would afterwards have a senate of six hundred, into which more knights were admitted than there used to be, but that the courts of justice would be taken out of their hands. Yet the plan of Drusus seems after all to have been the best thing that could have been done at that time ; as he also meant to give the citizenship to the Italians, thus renewing the strength of the higher classes by bringing in a fresh aristocracy, and enlarging the Roman state into a na- tion. He likewise aimed at restoring the middle classes, and carrying through a new agrarian law in favour of the Romans and Italians : but about this we know very little indeed. Yet as the Italians were more closely connected with the Romans, than with the Umbrians and Etruscans from whom they were politically sever- ed; the same split showed itself between these two masses, which there had been in the time of C. Gracchus between the Romans, on the one hand, and the Latins and Italians, on the other. The Latins were in the colo- nies scattered all over Italy from Valentia in Bruttium to the foot of the Alps, and in the few old Latin towns which had not yet got the right of citizenship, as Tibur and Praeneste; by Italians were meant the Sabellian peoples, the Sabines, the Marsians and their confeder- ates, the Picentines, Samnites, and perhaps also the Lu- canians, unless the condition of these had been made worse by the war of Hannibal. Very likely the boon was not intended to be given to Apulians and Sallen- tines, where the Greek element was paramount. All the rest were looked upon as foreigners ; and therefore nothing was said in this matter about the Umbrians, Etruscans, Bruttians, and the Greek maritime towns. Yet we may learn from the history of every free state, how the growth of such claims will keep spreading M. LIVIUS DRUSUS. 347 wider and wider. At Geneva, there had long been a struggle between the citoyens and bourgeois,* and the latter of these won for themselves the same rights as the former. Then started up the claims of the natifs, who had been born in Geneva of foreign parents, and had sided with the representants in their quarrel with the negatifs; and in the revolution of 1789 they were granted the full franchise. But then came also the ha- bitants, the strangers, and demanded the same rights. Such a succession of claimants is to be found in all re- publics, whenever there is any stagnation in them. The history of Drusus is the crux historicorum, unless one speculates on the state of things in a thoroughly prac- tical spirit. Freinsheim, who lived entirely among his books, and who never thought of looking at what had happened in his own city of Strasburg, was not able to understand those relations ; he was quite bewildered by them. Without this kind of knowledge, the tribune- ship of Drusus is a riddle : he is said to have been an aristocrat, and still to have been popular. The knights opposed the two laws with the utmost fury ; notwithstanding which they were carried, as the Italians came in crowds to Rome, ready to take up arms, if need be. As this had therefore been brought about by the most unlawful means, the majority of the senate, with an infatuation which is beyond belief, resolved, when the Italians were gone, that the promise to the allies should not be kept ; and on Drusus' urging it, he met with a refusal. This gave rise to the most deadly hatred be- tween him and the faithless senate, which accounts for Cicero's words, tribunatus Drusi pro senatus auctoritate susceptus infringi jam debilitarique videbatur.^c He ap- peared either in the light of a liar, or a dupe. And even as the knights were displeased with Drusus, so like- wise, on the other hand, was the stupid party of the oligarchs then uppermost. They said, " Shall we then * VoL I., p. 167. t De Orat. I, 7, 24. 348 M. LIVIUS DRUSUS. for ever place on the same footing with ourselves those three hundred knights who are thorns in our side 1 " Such people are blind to the inevitable necessity of mak- ing some concessions : by merely saying " no ! " they think that they can keep everything in its old place. Thus there now happened what, from the nature of the human heart must have come to pass : Drusus, who until then had been a zealous partisan of the govern- ment, henceforth began an opposition against the senate which was quite at variance with his former ways. The ruling faction in the senate, as well as the equites, wish- ed for the death of Drusus ; the consul Philippus was his sworn foe. It was this man who first uttered that terrible saying, that there were not more than two thousand families in Rome which possessed unimpaired property. The unhappy Drusus at once saw himself forsaken. He was a man of a violent temper, and yet he had undertaken that most perilous task of negotiating as a mediator with the Italians ; (the Latin colonies were quiet ; for as they were sure of being the first en- franchised, they let the others urge their claims, and but few of them had entered into the interests of the Italians.) That curious fragment from the Vatican, which the editor did not understand, and entitled" O^o? , * gives us the oath which the Italians took. It betokens an association of a very peculiar kind ; they bound themselves to obey his orders unconditionally, and to enrol in their districts partisans who would stand by him, as was done thirty years ago in Ireland. Drusus was in such a state, that he could hardly be said any longer to have a will of his own ; he was in a perfect fever : had he been fairly supported by those who were in power, he might still have found a way out of his diffi- culties. But he was already goaded into frenzy ; and his behaviour towards Philippus, in which he did things that he ought never to have ventured on, strongly * Diod. Exc. Vatic., p. 128., Dind.— Germ. Ed. M. LIVIUS DRUSUS. 349 shows in what a fever he must have been. When on the eve of a great debate, he was now walking up and down with his friends in the lobby of his house, — in these corridors which had no windows, and were lit up with candelabras, the men of rank would move about among a throng of people who were assembled there, and give audience, — he was stabbed in the side by an assassin. The man who did it was never discovered, and it is even uncertain by whom he was hired. He had scarcely been dead a few hours, when all his laws, with the exception of those which related to the courts of jus- tice, were annulled ; and in doing this, the senate arro- gated to itself a power hitherto unheard of. Drusus' death fell out at a most unfortunate moment. The Italians were excited to the highest pitch, and yet there was no one to take their part : public opinion at Rome was against them, as if they were rebels ; just as perhaps in England the great body of the people were hostile to the emancipation of the Irish Roman Catho- lics, or, when the American war broke out, to the North Americans. The party of Drusus, which now showed itself again in the senate, was entirely without a head : Crassus bad just died ; the two Scsevolas, M. Antonius, and the wisest men, knew no longer what to advise, and were in- timidated. Instead of allaying the storm, people rashly dared it, the knights charging the senate with treason. The former had at their beck a tribune, Q. Varius, — whose right of citizenship was not even certain, as he was born in Spain of a Spanish mother, though his fa- ther was a Roman : this was a brutal man, vastus homo et fcedus, as Cicero calls him, whose impudence served him instead of talent. He moved that a court should be established to discover the traitors who had nego- tiated with the Italians about their emancipation ; and the bill was carried against the strongest opposition of the first men in the senate, the knights joining for this purpose with the rabble, who indeed were most furious. They appeared in the forum in arms when the question 350 THE SOCIAL WAR. was put to the vote. There sprang up now a vast num- ber of impeachments ; several of the very noblest were convicted of having given traitorous encouragement to the Italians. A very remarkable state of feeling had at this time arisen in Rome : the senate acted the part of democrats ; the people, headed by the knights, that of the aristocrats ; and whereas the former wished to eman- cipate the Italians, the latter would not do it. THE SOCIAL WAR. MITHRIDATES. CIVIL WAR BETWEEN THE PARTIES OF MARIUS AND SYLLA. L. CORNELIUS CINNA. THE Social War is one of those periods of Roman his- tory in which the scantiness of our information is par- ticularly annoying. Livy had described the events of those two years in four books ; but the only connected narrative which we have, is the scanty one of Appian, and besides this there are some exceedingly brief no- tices. * And yet the Social War is one of the very great- est, not only on account of the passions which were dis- played in it on both sides, but also because of the changes in its fortunes, and the excellent generalship which was to be found in both armies. The first symptoms of a tendency of the allies to se- parate themselves, are met with even as early as the second Punic war, when the allies in the camp of Sci- pio mutinied, and chose two consuls from among them- selves ;t the insurrection of Fregellas followed soon afterwards. The war was not begun by those who had originally planned it, but by the peoples which lived farther off. Which of these was the first to resolve * In the year 1827, Niebuhr had remarked, " Now we shall probably know soon some further details about it, thanks to the fragments of Diodorus discovered by MaV, if they be really new ones." — Germ. Ed. t See above, p. 130. THE SOCIAL WAR. 351 upon it, is more than we know ; but it is stated that in the year 662, during the tribuneship of M. Livius Dru- sus, there was a plot to kill the Roman consuls (Philip- pus especially) and the senate at the Latin Feast. At that solemnity indeed, the whole of the Roman magis- tracy (j!/«j/ srtoct; (viz. • the year 665, Sylla had gone to Achaia and Thessaly. At that time, Archelaus and Taxiles, the generals of Mithridates, were masters of the Peloponnesus, and of Greece south of Thermopylae. Then Sylla won the battle of Chaeronea from a countless host of Asiatics, — a battle which he surely could not have classed among those on which he rested his glory ; for the Asiatics, who were a hundred thousand men, showed themselves as coward- ly as ever were the troops of Indian princes. They were indeed drawn up in phalanx ; but it was true of them what somebody has said with regard to those ingenious- ly prepared dishes in Lunt, that fish, even when dressed by the very best of cooks, is after all nothing but fish. Sylla lost but a few men here and there. A different defence was made by Archelaus in the Piraeeus. The walls between the city of Athens and its port had been 376 THE FIRST MITHRIDATIC WAR. destroyed, perhaps by Demetrius Poliorcetes, and as early as the siege by Antigonus Gonatas the communi- cation seems not to have been free ; but the huge walls of Themistocles, as restored by Conon, were still stand- ing. In the Piraeeus, where there was a Pontic garri- son, Archelaus gallantly held out ; in the city, the ty- rant withstood the enemy with hired troops. Archelaus did everything in his power to supply Athens with pro- visions; but to no purpose, as he was baffled by the vigilance of Sylla, who far surpassed him in talent and resources. The distress in the city rose to such a height, that the inhabitants had no strength left ; the circum- ference of the wall amounted to a German mile, and there were not men enough to defend it. The town was stormed, and a frightful slaughter ensued, as if the Athenians had been the deadliest enemies of the Ro- mans. Afterwards the Piraeeus also was taken. In Athens itself, few of the buildings were touched, not even the walls being destroyed : in the Piraeeus, however, the walls, the noble arsenal, and other buildings, were com- pletely demolished; so that from that time the place was like the decayed towns in the north of Holland, where the grass grows in the streets : Pausanias found only a small hamlet where it had stood. Athens was al- most depopulated, and after this the saying of Lucan held good with regard to it, Rarus et antiquis habitator in urbibus errat. Sylla now gained several other advantages, and drove the generals of the king of Pontus quite out of Europe into Asia. Even before him, L. Valerius Flaccus had come thither as proconsul ; but he had been murdered by his quaestor or legatus, C. Flavius Fimbria, who took upon himself the imperium in his stead. Mithridates, thus hemmed in between two armies which were hos- tile to each other, marched first against Fimbria who had destroyed Ilium. Sylla now concluded a peace which almost startles one's belief. Mithridates aban- doned all his conquests, and renounced all claim to Paph- SYLLA'S EXACTIONS. 377 lagonia, Cappadocia, Bithynia, and Phrygia, thus con- fining himself to his hereditary dominions ; moreover, he paid down two thousand talents, and yielded over seventy ships of war : in return for this, Sylla did not insist upon his advisers being given up. Sylla now pressed Fimbria so hard, that he took away his own life, and his soldiers went over to his rival, who, however, did not trust them, as they were as coitfaminati caede consulis, and partizans of Marius : for most of them were certainly Italians, enlisted against Sylla at the time that Marius was in power. These soldiers still remained there, under the name of Valeriani, for many a year, until the days of Pompey and Lucullus; just as the soldiers of Cannao had to stay so long in Sicily. After having made this peace, he laid a fine on the Greeks and the Hellenized inhabitants of Asia Minor, the lonians, Lydians, and Carians, who had murdered the Romans, even to the amount of five years' taxes, — probably the arrears for the whole period of the war, — and a war contribution besides. This crushed them for a long time : but the countries in those parts may so truly be called an earthly paradise, that even under a bad government, be it only not so barbarous as that of the Turks, the land must, after a few generations, again be rich and thriving, and more so perhaps than any in the south of Europe. Thus they also then recovered, and under the emperors, they were most flourishing ; but it had taken indeed several generations to set them up again : the first generation after the days of Sylla, was utterly ruined. An officer once told me, how he had seen a succession of countries, each finer than the other : first Rome ; then Naples, which is much more blooming still; then the Peloponnesus, which in fertility and luxuriance of vegetation, is infinitely ahead of Naples ; then Smyrna, which, beyond comparison, far surpasses all the rest. The contributions, which amounted to thirty millions (of Prussian dollars), were collected with the greatest harshness within a wonderfully short space. 378 SYLLA'S ARMY. The Roman knights, who always followed in the train of the generals, now advanced the money at the rate of twenty-four, thirty-six, even forty-eight per cent., and afterwards enforced the payment of principal and in- terest with the help of the governors. This was the most frightful tyranny, the sword itself having wasted those countries not near so much as usury did : but Sylla, it is true, could not have carried on his war with- out money. Sylla showed himself to be great indeed. His house was pulled down, and his property destroyed ; his family had been obliged to fly the country ; his friends were either murdered, or driven into banishment, and many of these last came to him, entreating him to return. Mithridates, moreover, would long since have concluded a peace which indeed would have been less advantageous to the Romans ; but Sylla wished to bring the war quite to an end, and to get the most favourable terms pos- sible, first taking care of the interests of his country, before he looked to his own. Thus he now returned with a victorious army which was proud of him, and attached to him, being also in possession of great pecu- niary resources. He had not more than thirty thousand men, whereas there were opposed to him in the whole of the Italian peninsula as far as Gaul, four hundred and fifty cohorts, that is to say, more than a hundred and eighty thousand men : (for at that time armies were counted by cohorts of four hundred and twenty men, more rarely by legions.) And this was a party besides, which had to fight for its very existence, containing also the Samnites, who could not under any circum- stances have concluded a peace with Sylla. This army he attacked in full reliance on his own strength and good fortune, and conducted the war in a manner which was most glorious to his fame. When Sylla brought back his army to Italy, L. Cor- nelius Scipio and C. Norbanus Balbus were consuls: here also we again find patricians siding with the de- SYLLA'S SUCCESSES. 379 mocrats. If any one of them had had dictatorial power, and had known how to make use of it ; if therefore the military resources had been properly managed, Sylla must have been lost: for against the overwhelming numbers of the opposite party, his success would have been impossible. But the Roman state was at that time so disorganized, and the leaders after Marius' death so incapable; that it was just as it was in France, in the year 1799, when the Directory was so helpless, that without Buonaparte's return it would have been lost. Under such circumstances, rebellions multiply, as the people expect more from any change, than from the con- tinuance of the existing state of things. Sylla reckoned on the incapacity of the chiefs of the opposite faction, and on the hatred which every one had had for their leaders : that now happened which the judicious Caelius Rufus writes to Cicero of the contest of Caesar and Pom- pey. * Even of the new citizens, very many were filled with disgust and abhorrence against the actual govern- ment, and ready to go over to Sylla, if they had only a hope of being maintained in their rights : could the rul- ing party have relied on the bulk of the new citizens, and on part of the old ones, Sylla would certainly never have been victorious. He therefore, even while his first campaign was still going on, made an alliance with the new citizens in which he confirmed all their rights. Thus, when he landed at Brundusium, he was received with open arms. Preparations for attacking him had been talked of; but those ordered by Carbo, had mis- carried owing to the general opposition. Sylla marched quite peacefully through Apulia; near Canusium,f if a statement which certainly is very likely, be correct, he had a battle indeed with the consul Norbanus, al- * This passage, which is of the year 1827, and is given with the same conciseness in all the MSS. which are at my disposition, is only to be interpreted by conjecture. Probably it is Epist. Ccel. ad Cic. (Fam. viii.) 14, 3. In hac discwdia video Cn. Pompemm senatum, quique res judicant, seoum hdbiturum: ad Ccesarem omnes, ters. Had tha Spaniards only stood by each other, he would certainly have beaten both of these enemies; but POMPEY. 403 he had just as much to struggle against the traitors :among the Spaniards as against the Romans themselves. In two battles, on the Guadalquivir and on the Sucro, he withstood the united forces of the two Roman gen- erals, and in both, one wing of each army was victori- ous ; but as the Spaniards did not remain true to him, he got at last into very serious difficulties, notwith- standing all the readiness of his inventive mind. Many towns fell away from him ; but in other quarters he met with all that faithful attachment is able to do : when Calagurris held cut against a very sharp siege, he -did his utmost to relieve it, in which he was also at length successful. Yet the cowardice and faithlessness of sev- eral towns goaded him into an action which is a stain upon his life : he even sold their hostages for slaves. It is true that other generals have often behaved in the same way ; but yet he ought not to have done it, as it was at variance with his noble-heartedness, and his power was altogether a moral one : the consequeace of it was, that the attachment of the other towns feegaa likewise to waver. With Sertorius was M. Perperna, a Roman of very high rank, probably a son of the consular M. Peperna: to judge from his name, he was most likely of Etruscan extraction, -na being an Etruscan termination which corresponds to the Roman -iits. * He had gathered to- gether the remnants of the soldiers of Lepidus, and had wished at first to carry on the war by himself; but he was forced by his own troops to lead them over from Sardi- nia into Spain, and to acknowledge Sertorius as com- mander-in-chief. This man conspired with some other Romans against Sertorius, who before that had already had several persons executed for plots of this kind; * It has been said that all the Roman gentile names, ended in -ins ; but in names like Ctecina, Vibena, Porsena, and others, the termination -na remained, even after the clan had become Roman citizens. Ernesti, who had not perceived this, mistook Csecina for a cognomen, and sought f >r the name of the clan ; but the inscriptions confirm the fact of its being a gentile name. 4(H SERVILE WAR. owing to this circumstance, Perperna found many who were ready to join him. Sertorius was murdered at a feast. At his funeral, an incredible number of Spa- niards, faithful to their vow, fell by each other's hands. Perperna was from necessity acknowledged as general ; but in the first engagement with Pompey, he was ut- terly routed, taken prisoner, and put to death.* SERVILE WAR. SPARTACUS. M. LICINITJS CRASS0S. POMPEY was now made consul : he was the favourite of the people, as it was expected that he would restore the tribuneship. In no other way can I account for this enthusiasm. It might indeed much rather have been felt for Caesar, whose nature was such that no worthy hearted man could come near him without loving him, even as Cicero in truth was always fond of him : it is a very noble want of the people, that it longs so often to find an object for its enthusiasm. Pompey had not yet been invested with any curule dignity ; notwith- standing which, he was consul with Crassus, a man with whom he was at that time on such ill terms, that the Romans trembled lest the two foes should take up arms against each other. But at the urgent entreaties of the senate they made up their quarrel, and both of them behaved like honourable men ; for during nineteen years afterwards they never were really enemies again, and they sometimes even appeared to be very good friends. Crassus had gained his importance as the conqueror of Spartacus. About three t years after Sylla's death, Spartacus, a Thracian, had with forty, others say with seventy-four gladiators, broken out of a barrack of gla- * With the death of Sertorius, the lectures of 1826-7 are brought to a rondusion. — Germ. Ed. f More correctly, /oe.— Germ. Ed. SPARTACUS. 406 diators at Capua. There is a house at Pompeii which is very like a barrack, with rooms in which arms were found, and which has therefore been called the soldiers' quarters. The very fact that there should have been a garrison at Pompeii, seemed to me quite incredible ; but on closei- examination, I recognised the arms as being of the same description as those described by , Livy as having been in use among the Samnites, which