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ITALY AND HER INVADERS.
CHAPTER IX.
CAUSES OF THE FALL OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE.
WE have now
followed the fortunes of Italy from the days when it was the stronghold of an
apparently resistless Empire to the time when there was no longer an Imperator
in Italy, and when the highest representative of law and government was the
leader of the Herulian mercenaries, Odovacar.
Why did the
Roman Empire fall? An adequate answer to that question would fill many volumes,
and would need to spring from a deep and minute knowledge of the Roman mind,
the Roman laws, and the Roman armaments, to which no pretension is here made.
The answer suggested in the following pages will be confessedly imperfect and
inadequate, but even the fragments of a reply to such a question can hardly be
quite devoid of interest.
The Roman
Empire of the West fell because it had completed its work, and the time had
come for it to be cut down, and to cumber the ground no longer. Its rise, its
extension over nearly the whole civilized world, had been a vast blessing to
humanity; its prolonged existence, even had it been governed by an endless
succession of Emperors like Trajan and Marcus, would have been a bane as great
as the blessing. To all the nations around the Mediterranean sea it had brought
peace, discipline, the reign of law, the preparation for Christianity; but it
had robbed them of liberty, and as century was added to century, the virtues of
the free man were being more and more effaced by the habit of blind submission
to authority. It was time for the Teutonic nations to rejuvenate the world, to
bring their noisy energy into those silent and melancholy countries, peopled
only by slaves and despots. It was time to exhibit on the arena of the world
the ruder virtues and the more vigorous vices of a people who, even in their vices,
showed that they were still young and strong; it was time that the sickly odour of incense offered to imbecile Emperors and lying
Prefects should be scattered before the fresh moorlandair of liberty. In short, both as to the building up, and as to the pulling down of
the world Empire of Rome, we have a right to say, ‘ It was, because the Lord
God willed it so.'
Of course, this
manner of stating the problem cannot hope for acceptance from an influential
school of thinkers at the present day. ‘What!' they will at once exclaim,
‘would you bring back into historical science those theological terms and those
teleological arguments from which we have just successfully purified it? Are
you not aware that history, like astronomy, like physics, like every other
science, spends its infancy in the religious stage, its adolescence in the
metaphysical, and when it has reached its full maturity and become thoroughly
conscious of its powers and of its aims, passes into the positive, or
materialistic stage—that stage from which the Will of God, the Freewill of Man,
Final Causes, and every other metaphysical or theological conception is
excluded, and in which Law, fixed and immutable, however hard to discover, must
reign supreme?’
Such, it may be
admitted, is the utterance of the ‘Zeit-Geist,’ of that convergence of many
minds towards a single thought, which we call by the less forcible English
equivalent, ‘the Spirit of the Age.' But, looking back over many past ages, and
seeing the utter death and decay of many a ‘Zeit-Geist,' once deemed omnipotent
and everlasting, the Zeit-Geist of Egyptian Hierophants, of Spanish
Inquisitors, of the Schoolman, of the Alchemist, of the Jacobin, one is
disposed to look the present Time-Spirit boldly in the face and ask why it, any
more than its predecessors, must be infallible and eternal.
There was a
time when Final Causes were the bane of all the sciences, when men attempted to
deduce from their crude notions of what God ought to have done, a statement of
what He has done, and thus easily evaded the toil of true scientific enquiry.
Our great master, Bacon, recalled the mind of Man from these fruitless
wanderings, and vindicated, for the collection of facts and the observation of
law, their true place in all philosophy. But he did not share that spirit of
Agnosticism, that serene indifference to the existence of an ordering mind in
the Universe, which is professed by many of his followers in the present day.
It could not have been said of him, as it may, perhaps, hereafter be said of
some of his greatest disciples, ‘Blindness in part has fallen upon the Physical
Philosopher. While groping eagerly after the How of this visible universe, he
has missed the clue to the vaster and more momentous questions of its Why and
its By Whom.’
The present
writer belongs to the old-fashioned school, which still dares and delights to
speak of God in Nature and of God in History. To declare, as we venture to do,
with all reverence and confession of our dim-sightedness, that we believe we
can trace the finger of the Creator and Lord of the world in events like the
Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, is by no means to assert that we can explain
the ways of Providence in all the occurrences either of the present or of the
past; it by no means commits us to the proposition that ‘all things have
happened for the best in the best of all possible worlds.' For one who believes
in the God of whom the Christian Revelation speaks, or even in the God whom
Socrates felt after and found, neither optimism nor pessimism would seem to be
the rational frame of mind. We look back over our own lives; we see faults and
blunders in them past counting. Assuredly it would have been better for us and
for our little fragment of the world that these should not have been committed—so
much the pessimist truly urges.
But then, we
can also see, as we think—but here each individual of the race must speak for
himself—traces of a higher Power contending with us in our blindness, sometimes
bringing good out of our follies and mistakes, always seeking to educate us and
to raise us:
‘On
stepping-stones
Of our dead
selves to higher things'.
In all this we
do but ratify the statement of one who had meditated on human nature at least
as deeply as any modern sociologist:
‘There's a
divinity that shapes our ends
Rough-hew them
as we will.’
So much the
optimist may claim. Why the divinity has not shaped the whole world's career to
nought but a good end is confessedly inexplicable, and will perhaps be forever
unintelligible to us. Meantime, therefore, we hold the two unreconciled
beliefs, in the Almightiness of God and in the existence of evil which is his
enemy. To discard either of these beliefs, or to harmonize them, we find
equally impossible, and therefore we desist from the attempt, and let both grow
together till the harvest. If this be true in the Universal, of the whole
‘scheme and constitution of things,' we may reasonably expect to find in the
Particular—for instance, in the course of European history—some events of which
we may confidently say, ‘God brought them to pass in order to promote the
welfare of Humanity,' and others of which we can only say, ‘Why this
irretrievable ruin, in which apparently there lurked no germ of benefit to the
Human Race, was permitted, is a mystery.' To apply these general principles to
the case before us, we assert with confidence that both the arising and the
fall of the Roman Empire were blessings to the human race, and that we are
justified in regarding them as the handiwork of an Unseen Power, the Maker and
the Friend of Man. But that every step in the upward career of Rome was
beneficial to man, or was accomplished with the smallest possible amount of
human suffering, we do not believe. Nor, conversely, would we assert that the
foundation of the new Teutonic kingdoms might not conceivably have come to pass
at a time and in a way which would have been more beneficial to humanity. It is
impossible to read the history of the Early Middle Ages without feeling that,
for the first six centuries after the fall of the Western Empire, there is
little or no progress. The night grows darker and darker, and we seem to get
ever deeper into the mire. Not till we are quite clear of the wrecks of the
Carolingian fabric, not till the days of William the Norman and Hildebrand, do
we seem to be making any satisfactory progress out of Chaos into Cosmos. It is
possible to imagine many circumstances which might have prevented the waste of
these six centuries, and perhaps have started Europe on her new career with the
faith of the thirteenth century joined to the culture of the age of the Renaissance.
Had the sons of Theodosius possessed half the vigor of their father; had
Stilicho and Aetius not been stabbed in the back by the monarchs whom they were
laboring to defend; had the Arian controversy not made its ineffaceable rift
between conquerors and conquered; had the Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy and the
Visigothic kingdom of Aquitaine not been overthrown by Justinian and by Clovis;
had a very slight change in the obscure politics of the Arabian tribes cut
short the preaching of Mohammed son of Abdallah; it is possible that centuries
of human suffering might have been mitigated, and that the freshness of heart
which so many of the European nations seem to have lost in the ages since the
Renaissance might still be theirs.
But our
business is with the events that were, not with those that might have been. Let
us, therefore, proceed to consider some of the secondary causes which in the
ordering of the Providence of God, brought about the transfer of the sceptre of Rome into the hands of the Barbarians.
1. The Foundation of Constantinople.
There is
perhaps no more striking illustration of a nation's powerlessness to discern
the dangers that are really most menacing to its future, than the Persophobia (if we may coin a word for history from
politics), which, down to the very days of the Visigothic invasion, and even
beyond them, seems to have haunted the minds of Roman statesmen. True, the
Parthian or Persian Monarchy was the only other civilized or semi-civilized
state which rose above the horizon of Roman consciousness. The defeats of
Crassus and Valerian, the ignominious peace concluded by the successor of
Julian in the plains beyond the Tigris, no doubt alarmed as well as humbled
every Roman. Still, after making full allowance for the impressions produced by
these events, it is difficult to understand why, when Hun and Vandal and
Visigoth were actually streaming into the very heart of the Empire, the Persian
should still have been the favorite bugbear of poets and orators. But Claudian,
for example, continually speaks of ‘the Mede' as Rome's most terrible foe; and
when he rises into his highest heaven of prophetic rapture over the glories of
Honorius, he always predicts the conquest of Babylon or Ecbatana.
Thus, at the
end of his poem on the third Consulship of Honorius, he says to the Imperial
brothers,
‘ E'en now
great Babylon despoiled I see,
In fear
unfeigned the Parthian horsemen flee;
The Bactrian
cons the Roman legist's lore,
Ganges grows
pale between each subject shore,
And Persia
spreads her gems your feet before.'
And so, in many
similar passages, involuntary homage is rendered to the Sassanian monarchs of
Persia, by representing them as the most formidable of the antagonists of Rome.
It was this
fear of the Persian monarchy which doubtless partly induced Constantine to
plant his new capital at the meeting-point of Europe and Asia. In a certain
sense it may be said that the measure was justified by its consequences. Except
for the disastrous retreat of Julian's army—and even his expedition was a
triumph, only converted into a defeat by the over eagerness of the
General—Persia won no considerable victories over Eastern Rome, and in the
seventh century she was utterly overthrown by the Emperor Heraclius. Moreover,
the wonderful political prescience of the founder of Constantinople was clearly
shown by the tenacity with which, through the greater part of eleven stormy
centuries, the Empire, which had that city for its brain, clung to life. Avars,
Bulgarians, Saracens, Russians, Seljouk Turks, Latin
Crusaders, foamed over the surrounding provinces and dashed themselves to
pieces against its walls, but none except the Crusaders effected an entrance,
and none effected a durable conquest till the terrible day when the dynasty of
Palaeologus succumbed to the dynasty of Othman. And the fact that Stamboul is to this day a spell of such portentous power in
the incantations of modern diplomatists, is the most powerful of all
testimonies to the genius of the young prince who was hailed Imperator by the
legionaries at York.
But if the
question be asked, What was the effect of the building of Constantinople on
Italy and Old Rome? if it be considered that the true object of a statesman of
the Lower Empire should have been, not to protract the existence of a
semi-Greek, semi-Asiatic dominion, a kind of bastard Rome, but to keep the true
Rome, the City of the seven hills, in her high place at the forefront of
humanity, or, if she must needs fall, to make her fall as honorable and her
transformed spirit as mighty as possible,—then our answer will be widely
different, and we shall have to rank the founder of Constantinople foremost
among the destroyers of the Empire.
We have seen in
the course of this history the infinite mischief wrought by the rivalry between
the Ministers of the Eastern and Western Empires. At the critical moment of
Alaric's preparations for his invasion Stilicho alone might probably have
crushed him; but the subtle Goth
Sold his
alternate oaths to either throne.
Each Empire
trusted that the blow was about to fall on the other—a blow which the
sister-realm would have witnessed with Christian resignation—and thus the time
for anticipating it and for destroying the destroyer passed away, the sort of
jealousy which had sprung up between the two capitals is well illustrated by
the following lines of Claudian. The passage also gives us a picture of the
populace of the New Rome, which, though no doubt charged with hostile feeling,
connects itself sufficiently with the Athens of Alcibiades, and the Nika
rioters of the days of Justinian, to justify us in accepting its main features
as correct.
In consequence
of Tribigild's revolt, Eutropius, then 399 chief
minister of Arcadius, convenes a sort of Council of War.
Pert youths
came there and grey beards lecherous,
Whose glory was
in trencher-combats won.
A menu subtly
changed from yesterday's
Is a most noble
exploit in their eyes.
By costly fare
they tickle appetite
And give to
those insatiate maws of theirs
The starry
birds that drew great Juno's car,
And India's
emerald prattlers of the woods.
Far realms
supply their dainties: their deep greed
The Aegean sea
and blue Propontis' lake And Azof's straits with all
their denizens Soothe for an hour, but fail to satisfy.
Then with what
art they wear their scented robes
Silken, but
heavy for those delicate limbs!
The highest
praise is his whose vapid jokes
Move loudest
laughter. See their ornaments,
Fitter for
girls than men, their shaven cheeks,
And mark them
on the days of spectacle.
The Hun, the
Goth may thunder at the gates,
The dancers
will not have one gazer less.
Rome's name
they ever scorn, and can admire
Only the
mansions which the Bosphorus laves.
Yet there are
arts in which e'en these excel:
Deftly they
dance and drive a chariot well.
Of course there
is spite in this description, but the fact that such a picture of the Byzantine
Court was acceptable to the dwellers by the Tiber shows the estrangement which
had sprung up between the Old Rome and the New.
Had the
Mistress of the World, when she found herself on all sides begirt by the ‘bark of savage nations,' deliberately withdrawn to her own ancient
citadel, put her fleets in order at Classis and Misenum,
so as to command the upper and the lower seas, and sent her hardiest troops to
garrison the difficult passes of the Alps, she might have lost many fair
provinces, but the heart of the Empire could hardly have been pierced. It was
the diffusion of her vital force over several nerve-centres,
Carthage, Alexandria, Antioch, but above all, Constantinople, that ruined her.
Some of the suckers lived on, but the old tree perished.
2. Christianity.
It was not by
an accidental coincidence that the Roman great historian of the Decline and
Fall of the Roman necessary Empire was also one of the ablest opponents of the
Christian Revelation to whom the last century gave birth. The sound of the
vesper-song of barefooted friars in the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, which
seemed to call him to his great enterprise, suggested to him, not untruly, that
an irreconcilable antagonism between the Genius of the Emperors and the Genius
of Christianity had caused the ruins which were piled around him. And what
seems to call for particular notice here is the fact that both the good and the
evil in Christianity contributed to this result; both those great spiritual
truths which made the essence of the new Religion when it came forth from the
hands of its Divine Founder, and those foreign elements which it borrowed from
philosophies and idolatries in the act of battling with them,— all fought
against the Rome of the Caesars.
First, as to
the essential opposition between the original uncorrupted spirit of
Christianity and the continuance of the Roman State. The religious ideas of the
Latin and Sabine tribes among whom the great Republic was born, were poor and
homely enough, without the Hellenic grace, or the Jewish sublimity, or the
Teutonic tenderness; but, such as they were, they absolutely moulded the character and institutions of the Roman people.
The Church did not encroach upon the province of the State, it simply was the
State. No order of priests contended for power or privilege with the officers
of the Republic; those officers themselves, as they reached certain stages in
their upward progress, became ministers of the gods, and, without any question
as to spiritual fitness, only with so much pretension to morality as an
originally moral people naturally required in its chief magistrates, they were
clothed, ex officio, with a certain sacred character. The word Religio itself, whatever be its precise etymological
significance, was understood to express the binding, cementing force which a
constant reference to unseen supernatural Powers exerts upon a commonwealth.
Hence the same mythmaking faculty which in the brain of
The lively
Grecian, in a land of hills,
Rivers, and
fertile plains, and sounding shores.
created Nymphs and Naiads
and Oreads, was employed by the more prosaic Roman to invent fresh gods for
every fresh development of the social, the political, even the financial life
of Man the Citizen. Thus, according to the curious catalogue of St. Augustine,
‘they commended children in the act of birth to the goddess Ops, children
crying to the god Vaticanus, lying in their cradles
to Cunina, sucking to Rumina, standing to Statilinus, arriving to Adeona, departing to Abeona. They
commended them to goddess Mens that they might have a
good mind, to Volumnus and Volumna,
god and goddess, that they might have a good volition, to the nuptial gods that
they might marry well, to the rurals, and especially
to goddess Fructesca, that they might receive plenteous fruits, to Mars and
Bellona that they might wage war well, to Victoria that they might conquer, to
the god Honor that they might be honored, to the goddess Pecunia that they
might have plenty of money, to the god Aesculanus and
his son Argentinus that that money might be both of bronze and silver. For Aesculanus was made the father because bronze money was
coined before silver; and, in truth, I cannot understand why Argentinus did not
beget Aurinus, since the silver coinage has been
followed by one of gold.’
Such a
religious system as this subjects itself easily to ridicule, as easily as the
faith of a modern Italian peasant in his own particular Madonna or Bambino, in
the San Cristoforo of one village, or the San Lorenzo of another. Like this
latter development, too, it probably glanced lightly over the minds of the upper
classes of society, and was tenaciously held in all its grotesque minuteness
only by the lower. Still this was substantially the religious system under
which the Great Republic had grown from youth to manhood; by its Pontiffs had
been declared the days for the assembly of the people in the forum, by its
augurs had the omens been taken in every one of its battle-fields. The
deification of Julius and Augustus was the national expression of the feeling
that the greatness of Rome was the peculiar care of the Eternal Gods, and that
the spirits which had wrought conspicuously at this grand task during their
earthly career, must still survive in the society of the Immortals, to watch
over the work of their own hands. It was with this faith—for faith we must surely
call it—in their hearts that the legions of Rome had marched on from victory to
victory. Their anticipations of reward or punishment in a future life might be
vague and varying, but at least they felt that the Great City with which they
had linked their fortunes was eternal, and the confidence that she would
survive all shocks of adverse fortune, and would treasure the names of her
defenders with undying reverence, gave strength, doubtless, not only to a
Decius or a Curtius, but also to many a simple Roman legionary at the moment of
facing death for her sake.
The whole of
this fabric of national faith, with whatsoever in it was noble, and whatsoever
in it was puerile, had to fall before the Apostolic proclamation, ‘To us there
is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him, and one Lord
Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him.' If there was any hint in
the Christian Scriptures of one nation favored above all others, that nation
was the Jewish, if any notion of a city chosen by the Eternal ‘to put his name
there,' that city was Jerusalem. But the latest and prevailing utterance of the
new religion was, ‘All nationalities are on the same level before God. He has
made of one blood all nations of men, to dwell on all the face of the earth.
Your citizenship, the true civitas, which is the highest condition that man can
attain to, is in heaven. This civitas is within reach of all men, Barbarian,
Scythian, bond or free, and makes brothers of us all.’
There was an
incurable opposition between teaching such as this, and the root-idea of the
Roman Commonwealth. The rulers of the State felt it, and were forced into
persecution, almost against their will. Gladly would they have consigned
Christianity to the peaceful Pantheon of the tolerated religions (religiones licitae), in which
already the worship of Astarte and Mithras, of Isis and the Dea Syria, flourished happily, side by side. But they perceived—the wisest Emperors
the most clearly—that this was a religion which would have all or nothing, and
they hunted it into the catacombs to bar it from the throne.
The
persecutions failed: they enlisted pity, generosity, love of justice, all the
nobler feelings of our nature, on the side of the votaries of the new religion,
and to these latter they gave a drill, a discipline, we must also in truth add
a bitterness of temper, which they had not possessed before. A time came when
the Christians found that they were the majority in the Empire, a time when the
young Emperor Constantine, with his foot upon the ladder of fortune, was
half-convinced of the truth of Christianity, and wholly convinced of the policy
of embracing it. For three generations the Emperors, with the exception of the
short reign of Julian, were the Christian masters of a household whose
traditions were still Pagan. Some of the anomalies which resulted from this
position of theirs have been glanced at in previous pages. We have seen that no
Emperor till the accession of Gratian dared to refuse the title of Pontifex
Maximus, which marked him as head of the State-Church of Heathenism. We have
also noticed the incongruity between the acts of Theodosius as Defender of the
Catholic Faith and the conventional language of the court poet, who makes him
the favorite of Mars and Jupiter during his life, and turns him into a star
after his death.
That this
strange medley of contending faiths had no effect in enfeebling the resolution
of Rome, and making her stroke uncertain, that the regiment which had fought so
long under one flag would fight just as well when that flag was replaced by
another, as hostile to it as the Lilies to the Tricolour,
is what no one would conjecture beforehand. And that the substitution of
Christianity for the worship of the deities of the Capitol had something to do
with the crumbling away of the Empire in the fifth century, is a conviction
which forces itself on our minds, and never so irresistibly as when we are
listening to the most eloquent and the most subtle apologist for Christianity,
Augustine, endeavoring to prove to us in his book on the City of God that the
thing was not so. One turns over page after page of that immortal treatise—that
Encyclopedia of the whole religious thought of the age; one feels the absurdity
of the Pagan theory, the grandeur of the Christian conception of the vast
unseen City of God, but, through it all, the antagonism between the true Roman
ideas and the ideas of Christianity rises more and more definitely before the
mind, and when we are called upon finally to adjudicate on the question ‘Would
the Rome of the Fabii and the Scipios,
the Rome which heartily believed in and worshipped Jupiter and Quirinus, Mavors, Ops, and Saturnus, have fallen as the Christian
Rome fell before the hordes of Alaric?' we are bound in our historical
conscience to answer, No.
Secondly. In
the course of its three hundred years' struggle for existence the new religion
had assimilated some elements, foreign as I venture to think, to its original
essence; and by these also it made war on Rome. The spirit of intolerance was
one of these extraneous elements, at any rate in so far as it relied on the
sword of the civil magistrate to carry its sentences into effect. The words of
St. Paul about heretics, ‘With such an one, no, not to eat,' and of St. John,
‘Receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed,' were aimed
apparently at men whose immorality was bringing the new society into reproach,
and contemplated exclusion from that society as the heaviest punishment to be
inflicted. The general attitude towards the heathen or the unbelieving Jew was
‘What have I to do with them that are without?'; and the proposal to arrange
the worldly affairs, even of Christians, authoritatively, was met by ‘Man, who
made me a judge or a divider over you?' ‘Whiles it remained was it not thine own,
and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power?'. In practice, the
relation of the professors of the new faith to ‘them that were without' during
the second century seems to have been reasonable and friendly. Justin Martyr
and Quadratus still wore the philosopher's cloak after their conversion to
Christianity, and endeavored to persuade their fellow- countrymen by an appeal
to the voice of the soul, who is herself naturally Christian, that the glad
tidings which they had to proclaim, though marvelous, were not incredible, and
were in harmony with the truest presentiments of man's own moral nature.
Would that the
new religion had always thus calmly addressed herself to the consciences of
mankind, that she had never shouted nor shrieked, nor tortured, in order to
enforce the acceptance of her message! Earth would be by many degrees more like
Heaven at this day, if she had thus remained true to her first gentle
instincts.
But the
persecutions came and went, and they changed, though they should not have
changed, the temper of the Christian champions. So was rendered possible that
utterance of Tertullian's (destined to an evil immortality), in which he
consoled his brethren for their conscientious abstinence from the pleasures of
the Hippodrome by promising them far greater spectacular pleasures in the life
to come, when from the safe security of Heaven they should behold so many proud
prefects, so many jeering philosophers, writhing in agony under the tortures of
the never-dying fires of hell. It may be admitted that the stem, almost morose,
temperament of Tertullian is answerable for some of this bitterness, but it
would not be difficult to quote passages of a similar tendency from Lactantius and other fathers of the Ante- Nicene Church. In
truth, it was not in human nature (though it should have been in the divine
that was intermingled with it) to see parents, brothers, sisters, dragged off
to an insulting and cruel death, for refusing to sacrifice to the Genius of the
Emperor, without some scowl of hatred becoming fixed above the eyes which
witnessed these things. And so persecution did not, as was once alleged, always
and entirely fail of its end. ‘The blood of the Martyrs was the seed of the
Church'; but it was a Church of different habit of growth, and producing more
acrid fruit than that which it replaced.
For seventy
years, however, after Constantine's edicts in favor of Christianity, the new
religion showed herself but little as a persecutor, at least of heathens. The
tolerant spirit of Constantine had something to do with this; the internal
divisions of the Christian Church, especially the long and fierce Arian debate,
still more. The Caesars of Rome, with the exception of Julian, settled down
comfortably into their anomalous position, each being at once Pontifex Maximus
of the old religion, and Moderator in the doctrinal controversies of the new.
It was as if the Ottoman Sultan, still retaining his claim to the Caliphate,
were to become a member of the Greek Church, and to throw himself earnestly
into the discussions about the Procession of the Holy Spirit.
We have heard
Theodosius, at the Council of Constantinople in the year 381, pronouncing the
final triumph of the Trinitarian party within the Church, and we have seen
something of the increased stringency of his determination to secure for that
Church, by the power of the State, the victory over her external foes, whether
Heathens or Heretics. True, these persecutions lacked the ferocity of those
which were set on foot by Decius and by Galerius; still they were; and for some
generations, with quiet, earnest deliberateness, the whole power of the
Emperors was employed in making all Christians think alike, and in preventing
non-Christians from thinking at all.
Constantius had
said, ‘We will that all men should abstain from sacrifices, and if any shall
hereafter offend against this law, let him be punished by the avenging sword'.
But the decree seems to have remained a dead letter, and the heathen sacrifices
went on nearly as before. Theodosius enacted new laws against heathen worship,
and by such acts as the demolition of the temple of Serapis at Alexandria gave
them practical effect. At the same time appeared upon the statute book a cloud
of edicts (some of which have been already quoted) against ‘the noxious
Manicheans and their execrable meetings,' against ‘the heretics of the Donatist
superstition,' against ‘the teachers and leaders of the crime of the Eunomians, especially their clergy whose madness has
brought about this great aberration,' against ‘all who are tormented by the
error of divers heresies, viz., the Eunomians, the
Arians, the Macedonian deniers of the Holy Ghost, the Manicheans, the Encratites, the Apotactites, the Saccofori, the Hydroparaatatae.'
Fine, imprisonment, loss of office, prohibition to assemble in the town or to give
to their places of meeting the appearance of churches, restriction of their
testamentary power—these are the penalties thundered forth in many an edict
against men who had committed no crime against the State, but whose theology
was different from the Emperor's.
The ferocity
and the terror of Diocletian's persecutions have passed away, but we find
ourselves breathing the same atmosphere of petty ecclesiastical tyranny which
produced the Five Mile Act and Conventicle Act of Charles II, the Penal Laws
against the Irish Catholics of William III and Anne. If there were nothing more
to be said against it, this attempt to harass men into uniformity of religious
opinion was an enormous waste of power, at a time when the energies of the
State were scarcely sufficient for its own proper work of administration. But
what made the matter worse, from the point of view of a Roman statesman, was
that the religion which was being maintained in domination at the cost of all
this legislative combat, was itself in no way essential to, nay, rather as has
been before said, was of necessity antagonistic to, the root-idea of the Roman
Commonwealth. A Mohammedan Sultan pressing heavily on the Giaour, an
Israelitish monarch slaying the priests of Baal, a Most Catholic king of Spain
burning Jews or expelling Moriscoes, were all acting more or less in accordance
with the spirit of which their royalty was the expression. But a Roman
Imperator harassing the Encratites or the Apotactites because the building in which they assembled
for divine worship too closely resembled a church of the orthodox, was an
utterly un-Roman Roman, an anomaly not only vexatious but ridiculous.
Yet it is
probable that to the somewhat narrow, martinet mind of Theodosius, and still
more to the dazed intellects of his sons, these measures of religious
persecution appeared solemn duties; nay more, that they regarded them as
peace-offerings, which would ensure the secular safety of the Empire. The
increasing calamities which befell the State were taken as manifestations of
the wrath of God; and no more obvious means of conjuring away that wrath
suggested themselves than the enactment of a new and sharper law against the
Manichean pravity or the Arian madness.
In the mist and
darkness which have gathered over the history of the fifth century, a mist and
a darkness through which only the bare forms of events are discernible, while
thoughts and feelings are utterly hidden, we know little indeed of the mood of
mind in which these successive Acts of Uniformity were received by the objects
of them. Heathenism and Heresy, like wounded creatures, crept back to their
caves and died there, but after what conflicts or with what struggles we know
not. The name ‘Paganus' (villager), for the worshipper of the old gods, is one
among many indications that Christianity conquered first the great cities, the centres of intellectual and commercial activity, and then
gradually, and we can hardly say how slowly, pushed her way into lonely glens
or wide unfrequented pasture-lands, and made the dwellers there bow before the
cross. Yet even in the cities and at the Imperial Courts the victory was not
fully won in the reign of Theodosius. It is a noteworthy fact how many of the
small band of literary men, who flourished in the latter days of the Empire,
remained faithful to the old superstitions. Ammianus Marcellinus, Zosimus,
Priscus, the chief historians of this period, are all Pagans, one at least of
them a bitter Pagan. Nor is it by any means certain that Procopius, the great
historian of the reign of Justinian, ought not to be added to the list.
Two other
elements of the Christianity of the third and fourth centuries cooperated in a
subordinate degree towards the decay of the Empire. These were the Priestly
Hierarchy and the Monastic Self-seclusion.
The fires of
Roman persecution had, doubtless, much to do with hardening and shaping, as
into a point of tempered steel, that marvellous episcopal organization which was one day to penetrate the world. As the
soldiers who survive on a well-fought battle-field look towards the officers
who have been with them in the thickest of the fray, so we may imagine the
hearts of the believers to have glowed with fresh loyalty towards the rulers of
the Church, when the rage of the Decian or the Galerian persecution was at length abated, and they had leisure to count their losses.
Thus, here also to the repressive measures of the Emperors must be attributed
some involuntary share in the change which came over the spirit of the Church
between the first century and the fourth, and which separates the simple and
scarcely differentiated Overseers and Elders of the Acts of the Apostles from
the full-grown Bishops and Priests of the time of Constantine. It is not likely
that such a well-disciplined and compact organization as the Christian
hierarchy can have grown up within and yet outside of the Empire without
impairing somewhat of its strength. And such victories as were won by Athanasius
over Constantius, or by Ambrose over Theodosius, though they command our
fullest sympathy as noble triumphs of the moral over the material, had probably
some effect in lessening the reverence which men felt for the Augustus as a
kind of ‘present divinity,' and so in loosening the fabric of the Empire. Yet
possibly we ought not to attribute large results to this cause. The great strifes between Bishop and Sovereign belong to a later age,
to the barbarian monarchies or to the Eastern Empire. Except indirectly, in so
far as it may have favored the persecution of heathens and heretics, the
Christian hierarchy need not be held responsible for a large share in the
pulling down of Imperial Rome.
Probably we may
come to a similar conclusion with reference to that other great phenomenon of
the religious life of the fourth and fifth centuries, the rise and progress of
the monastic system. It is interesting to see how this was viewed by an
educated, though certainly not unbiassed Pagan. Zosimus, speaking of the riots
at Constantinople in connection with the exile of Chrysostom (401), says, ‘The
city was filled with uproar, and the Christian church was occupied by the men
who are called Monks. Now these men renounce lawful wedlock, and fill large
colleges in the cities and villages with unmarried persons, profitless for war
and for any other of the State's necessities. Yet have they, in the interval
between that time and the present ' [perhaps half a century], ‘ made great
advances, so that they have now appropriated a large part of the land, and
under pretence of distributing all their substance to
the poor, have, in a manner, made all poor alike.'
The withdrawal
of so many men in the prime of life from the pursuits of industry and the defence of the state, must undoubtedly have lessened the
resources of the Empire, especially as these monks were not, like their
successors in the Middle Ages, the restorers of the waste places, the doctors,
engineers, and journalists of the community. At a time when the manliest virtue
was required to stem the torrent of corruption within and barbarism without,
men of noble soul and cultured intellect, like St. Jerome, retired into the
caves of Bethlehem, leaving the world a prey to hypocrites and rogues, such as Olympius and Eutropius. As the latter class of men,
despairing of the Roman state, sought to build up their own fortunes on the
general ruin, so the former class, with the same despair of the republic in
their hearts, determined at least to secure their own soul's salvation, and to
live for this alone. The selfishness was of a higher kind, but it would be hard
to deny that it was selfishness, and that the true Christian impulse would have
been to struggle on undaunted, and persist in the endeavour to leave the world better than they found it.
But, having
admitted this negative charge against monkery, we
cannot assign to it, in the Western Empire at least, any great active influence
for ruin. In the East, during the fifth century, the power of the monks was no
doubt far more hurtful to the State. ‘Armies of mad monks rushing through the
streets of Alexandria,' and their brethren in Constantinople stirring up the
people to shout for the deposition of the ‘Manichean tyrant,' whenever an
Emperor swerved by a hair's breadth from the razor-bridge of orthodoxy as
defined in the Council of Chalcedon—these were undoubtedly disintegrating and
dangerous forces; and when they were predominant, the government of the Empire
might truly be styled a government by lunatics. In the West we see no such
spectacles at the time which we are now discussing, and it would be a scandalous
injustice to class the calm Paulinus of Nola and the learned Claudianus
Mamertus of Vienne with the turbulent Eutyches, or the blood-stained Barsumas of Constantinople.
3. Slavery.
‘It was no
accidental catastrophe which patriotism and genius might have warded off: it
was old social evils—at the bottom of all, the ruin of the middle class by the
slave proletariat — that brought destruction on the Roman commonwealth'
(Mommsen, History of Rome, book 4. chap.
2).
The men of our
generation, who have read the story of General Sherman's march through Georgia,
are in a better position than their ancestors for estimating the part played by
slavery in bringing about the ruin of Rome. The short-lived Southern Confederacy
in America had many points of resemblance to the Roman republic. It was
administered by wealthy cultivators of the soil, born warriors, born orators, a
proud and courageous people. All that mere fighting could do to preserve its
existence was ably and, at first, successfully done; but Slavery, that rock of
offence which the Planters had made the corner-stone of their new edifice,
proved its ruin. The truth had been suspected for some little time before, but
was fully proved when Sherman's scarcely-resisted march through three hundred
miles of the enemy's country showed the hollowness of a political organization
which had been massing its armies, by hundreds of thousands at a time, on the
banks of the Potomac, but which could not reckon on its own inhabitants to
resist or seriously to harass an invader who had once broken through the wall
of steel on the frontier. It could not reckon upon them, because the majority
of them were themselves a hostile nation, made so by the institution of
slavery. True, in America as in Italy, the oppressed class waited long before
they dared to show on which side their sympathies lay. This is, for a time,
that which turns the scale in favor of the slave-holder, that his chattels are
too debased to be capable of self-organization, too ignorant to understand the
great movements in the world of politics and war, too servile-hearted to dare
to embrace what may not prove the winning side. But if there comes at length
such a time as came in Georgia lately, and in Etruria long ago, when the slave
sees with his own eyes a man, mightier than his master, come to overthrow all
that existing order which has weighed on him so heavily, and saying, ‘Help me,
and I will give you freedom,' then is seen the strange magic which lies in that
word freedom for even the heaviest clods of humanity; then the comfortable
persuasion of the self-deceived slaver owner, that his chattel will fight for
the luxury of continuing to be a chattel, vanishes; like snow in summer.
We have had to
record one instance—many more have probably been left unrecorded—of the
readiness of the Roman slaves to turn against their masters. In the interval
between the first and second sieges of Rome by Alaric, the slaves, to the
number of 40,000, fled to the barbarian camp. In his usual tantalizing way
Zosimus forgets to tell us the denouement of the story, but it may be
conjectured that the greater part of these slaves, if they ever returned to
Rome, returned with the army of Alaric through the blazing Salarian Gate to guide their new friends to the plunder of their old oppressors.
It would have
been interesting to know what was the total number of slaves in existence at
any particular period of the Empire, but a complete census of the whole
population of the Roman world, free and servile, if it ever existed, has not
survived to our day. Gibbon guesses the number of the slaves all over the
Empire at the time of Claudius at sixty millions; and it seems to be impossible
either to prove or disprove his conjecture. We are told, in round numbers, that
some citizens possessed 10,000 or 20,000 slaves apiece, and with more apparent
accuracy that a certain freedman under Augustus, although he had been
impoverished by the civil wars, left at his death 4,116 slaves. From other
sources we learn that in the days of Augustus, 200 slaves were not considered
at all an exorbitantly large establishment, and that he who had only five or
ten was looked upon as either very poor or very mean. In view of these facts,
40,000 seems a very small number for even the mere house-slaves in Rome at the
time of its siege by Alaric. Possibly the removal of the Court to Ravenna, and
the troublous character of the times, had led to the withdrawal of most of the
wealthy slave-owners from Rome; or the crowds of freedmen and paupers supported
by the public distribution of wheat may, in Rome itself, have thinned, by a
kind of competition, the number of actual bondsmen. Or, which is perhaps the
most likely supposition of all, Zosimus, the writer from whom the story of the
fugitive slaves is extracted, is speaking in his usual somewhat inaccurate
style when he says, that ‘nearly all' the slaves in Rome deserted to the camp
of Alaric.
As mention has
been made of slavery as it existed down to our own days in the United States of
North America, and as this is that type of the peculiar American institution
which most readily suggests itself to our minds, it may be well to remind the
reader of a few obvious points of dissimilarity between the two forms of
servitude, the Roman and the American.
I. It seems
probable that the condition of a slave under a Roman master was harder than
that of the negro in the Southern States of America. Cruel men of course abused
their dangerous power in both countries, while, under men of exceptional
gentleness, the lot of the slave may have lost almost all that made it to
differ from that of a hired laborers. But the great mass of masters, the men of
average character, had in the United States a conception of duty towards their
fellow-men which was, at least in some degree, influenced by the spirit of
Christianity, while the Roman derived his notions of duty from such teachers as
Cato the Censor, who, in a well-known passage, uttered his opinion that
whenever a slave was not asleep he ought to be at work, and that a master
should always sell off his aged slaves as well as his broken-down horses.
Certainly this cannot have been either the theory or the practice in Virginia
or Tennessee, hardly even, one would hope, in Mississippi or Alabama. It is
true that the tendency of legislation under the Emperors had been towards
greater mildness in the treatment of slaves. The master's absolute power of
life and death was taken away; in cases where he had practiced extreme cruelty
he might be compelled to sell the victim of it; and the huge gloomy ergastula, the prisons in which the slaves had been locked
up at night after their labor in the fields (which, if not subterraneous, were
always lighted by windows high up in the walls, from which there was no chance
of escape), were legally abolished, and perhaps practically disused. Still, the
life of the Roman's slave, especially of him who was engaged in agriculture,
seems to have been hard and dismal beyond even the hardness and dismalness of
ordinary negro slavery.
II. Yet in two aspects, more important perhaps than
all beside, the condition of the Italian bondsman was better than that of the
American. Love and hope were left to him. The breeding of slaves for sale was
an unusual though not unknown practice; and consequently though families must
sometimes have been separated, even as they are now by the ordinary economic
laws of supply and demand, that great blot on the American system, the
systematic tearing away of the wife from her husband and the mother from her child,
did not disgrace the Roman slave-owners. Manumission also must have been a far
more frequent incident of servile life among the ancients, and when it came it
opened up a far happier and more unhindered career.
This difference
between the two systems is chiefly due to the obvious and fundamental
distinction, that in Rome there did not, as in America, yawn the wide chasm of
absolute diversity of race between bond and free. All nations, even the noblest
of antiquity, were represented in the slave market at Rome. The Greek doctor,
or pedagogue, or scribe, the lusty Cappadocian who bore the litter, the Hebrew
of whose nation Titus sold 97,000 into bondage, the Syrian, the Celt, the
Dacian, the German, were all in their various ways ministering to the luxury or
providing for the wants of the Roman master. From such a motley throng
combination was little to be dreaded, and on the other hand there was in them
no great inferiority of race to prevent the slave, once liberated, from
standing side by side with his old master. Hence, and from motives of pride and
profit which made the freedman often a more desirable appendage to the family
of the Roman noble than the slave himself, arose the great frequency of
manumission, which was indeed slightly checked in the time of Augustus, on
account of the number of debased citizens with whom it was flooding the
Commonwealth, but which remained a sufficiently common practice sensibly to
ameliorate the condition of the Roman slave by introducing into it the vast
medicament of Hope.
We turn to
American slavery, and we see at once a mighty contrast. There every member of
the servile caste belonged to one race, and that race one separated by wide
ethnological interspaces from the dominant one, and far below it in
intellectual energy. It is said that a proposition once made in the Roman
Senate, to order all the slaves to wear a distinctive dress, was rejected, on
the ground that it would be dangerous thus to reveal to them their superiority
in numbers. What the Senate had denied in that case, Nature had done
ineffaceably in the case of ‘persons held to bondage’ under the American laws,
by clothing them all with one sable livery. Hence arose, on the one hand, the
pride of race which placed the meanest of ‘the mean whites' above the most
honest and capable man of African descent, and which denied to the latter, however
large his share of European blood, ex parte paterna, any share in the duties and rewards of civil
life. Hence, on the other hand, arose the fear of race, causing the State to
throw the whole weight of its influence into the scale against manumission, and
imposing upon every man, whose skin bore witness to the servile condition of
his ancestors, the burden of proof that he was not himself a slave. This state
of the law and of public feeling was of course utterly absent in old Rome.
III.
And, yet again, there was a difference which probably made the position of the
negro, when he began to reason and to reflect, more intolerable than that of
the Dacian or the Syrian in a Roman villa or on an Italian farm. In the fifth
century the conscience of the whole civilized world acquiesced in the fact of
slavery; in the nineteenth it protested against it. The Roman legislator said
that this abrogation of the natural rights of man was an institution of the
universal law of nations, and his saying was confirmed by the fact that there
was in all probability not one nation then existing, civilized or barbarian,
wherein Slavery, in one form or another, did not exist. And so the bondsman of
those days submitted to his servile condition, as men now submit to poverty or
disease, grumbling indeed that they have drawn a bad number in the lottery of
life, but without any intolerable feeling of injustice, without any indignant
questioning, ‘Why was this horrible fate ever placed for me or for any one
among the possible conditions of existence?'
In America we
all know what far different thoughts rankled in the breast of a high- spirited
and intelligent slave. Great nations were living and flourishing without this
institution which made his life hateful to him. Wide sections of the Christian
Church condemned it as a crime against God and man. A week perhaps, or two
weeks of nightly journeying towards the North Star, would take him to a land
where no slaves toiled; a few weeks more would set him beyond the possibility
of recapture. Assuredly this ever present thought that Liberty was in the
world, was near, but was not for him, must have made the chains of many an
American slave more galling, must have raised, sometimes almost to madness, his
exasperation against the social system which was his foe.
IV. Upon a review therefore of the main points of
likeness and unlikeness between these two conditions of society, it seems
reasonable to conjecture that the men who were owned by Roman masters were less
dissatisfied with their lot than those who belonged to the American planters,
and that Slavery as a disruptive force was more fatal to the Southern
Confederacy than to the Western Empire.
But in Rome it
had been working through twelve centuries, in the United States for less than
three, and therefore its evil effects were less lasting, one may venture to
hope, in the latter instance than in the former. Slavery had aided in the
massing together of those ‘wide farms' which were the ruin of Italy Slavery had
emptied the fields and villages of the hardy rustics who had once been the
backbone of Roman power. Slavery had filled the cities with idle and profligate
babblers. Slavery had indoctrinated these men, themselves often freedmen or the
sons of freed-men, with the pestilent notion that manual labor was beneath the
dignity of a citizen. And lastly, Slavery had surrounded the thrones of the
Emperors with men like Eutropius and Chrysaphius,
who, by the favor of a fatuous master, crept from the position of a menial to
that of a Prime Minister, and who, when their turn came, bitterly revenged upon
Society the wrongs which they had suffered at its hands.
A new and
happier world was to arise out of the ruins of the old. Slavery was to be
softened into Serfdom, and Serfdom was slowly to disappear, both changes being
largely attributable to the benign influence of the Christian Church. The fine
old mediaeval motto,
‘By hammer and
hand
All arts do
stand,'
was to drive
out, at any rate from the cities, the old, irrational, scorn of handicraft; and
the ergastulum and the scourge were to vanish like an
evil dream. And so if Slavery was a cause, the Abolition of Slavery was to be a
result, though by no means an immediate result, of the Fall of the Empire.
4. ‘Panem et Circenses,' or the Pauperisation of the Roman Proletariat.
The Roman State
at the beginning and the end of its career pursued towards its poorer classes
two opposite lines of policy, both unjust, one of which might reasonably have
been expected to strangle the rising nationality in its childhood, while the
other certainly hastened the ruin of its old age.
In the first
ages of the Republic the plebeian soldier was expected to leave his farm or his
business to serve for a short campaign against the Aequians or Volscians, and
to return to a home which had in many instances suffered from the depredations
of the enemy, enriched only by a precarious portion of the booty, which, by the
fortune of war or the unfairness of the dividing general, might turn out to be
worth little or nothing. The real gain of the most successful wars, the public
land, was farmed out often at little more than a nominal rent to the senators
or a few wealthy plebeians. Thus the whole tendency of the incessant wars of
the Republic was to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, a tendency
aggravated by the high rates charged for interest and by the stern attitude of
the Roman law towards the defaulting debtor. The well-known picture drawn in
the Second Book of Livy of the brave old centurion, whose farm had been
plundered during his absence with the army, and who, under the crushing load of
debt and taxation, had been obliged first to part with the inheritance of his
ancestors and then to surrender his person into the hands of his cruel
creditor, and who at length escaped from his place of torment into the Forum,
where his squalid garb, his long unkempt hair, his old and honorable scars
received in battle with the enemy, and the new and shameful scourgemarks upon his back inflicted by the slave of a Roman senator, stirred the people to
fury :— this picture may not be precisely and historically true of the 259th
year of the city, yet doubtless it is a type of many a similar occurrence in
those early days of the tyranny of wealth.
The
characteristic of Roman Legislation at this period is its contempt for the
rights of the individual, its frightfully unfair notion of the partnership
between him and the State—a partnership in which he gave his time, his blood,
his heroism, to promote the glory of Rome, and received in return nothing, not
even permission to live on the land of his fathers.
In the later
phases of the Roman Commonwealth the opposite error was committed. After the
Second Punic War the State really asked nothing of the poor citizen of Rome,
and gave him everything that was necessary for life, and, in so giving,
deprived him of
‘ Man's first, noblest,
birthright, Toil.'
The pauperizing
legislation of Rome first wore the insidious form of a gentle intervention to
lower the price of corn. When Spain, Sicily, and Africa were pouring in their
tributes of corn or money to the exchequer of the Republic, it was not an
unnatural suggestion that the wealth thus acquired might fairly be expended in
easing the material condition of the Roman citizens, of the men on whom had
fallen the heaviest weight of all the blows from Regillus to Cannae, by which the Roman State had been fashioned into greatness. Not an
unnatural thought; and yet if the remembrance of the scourged veteran in the
Forum, and of all the cruel wrongs of the early Plebeians, had anything to do
with ripening it into action, we have here an instance of that strange Nemesis
of Unrighteousness, which sometimes leads statesmen in the very excess of their
penitence for an injustice in the past to prepare a new and greater injustice
for the future. It had been a cruel wrong to send forth the Roman Plebeian to
fight the Volscian or Aequian, and not even to keep his homestead free from the
exactions of the creditor, who would not have been a creditor but for the
military service of the breadwinner. It was not less a wrong to make the
Spaniard or the Sicilian toil, in order to enable the descendants of that same
Plebeian to prolong a life of idleness and dissipation in the Roman Forum.
And,
indirectly, this interference with true economic laws injured Italy no less
than the Provinces. How was the Etrurian or Sabine
farmer to grow his corn to a profit, when the whole machinery of the
administration of the Republic was being employed to sell corn from beyond the
seas at far less than cost price in the Roman capital? This was not Free Trade;
it was, if we may use the expression, Protection turned inside out; it was a
systematic exclusion of the Italian corn-grower from his own natural market. Of
course the Italian farmer, already sorely harassed by the necessity of
competition with slave-labour, succumbed, and
virtually disappeared from the scene. The latifundia, the vast domains worked
by celibate slaves, took the place of the small yeomen's holdings; the horrible ergastulum replaced the free and happy homestead;
sheep-walks, vine-yards, and olive-yards occupied the ground once employed in
the growth of corn, and, more important by far than even the disappearance of
her waving corn-fields, Italy ceased to produce men as she had once done, just
when the need of men to bear the world-wide burden of her Empire was the
greatest.
There were
great fluctuations in the market price of corn under the Republic. In the
Second Punic War it rose as high as 51 shillings the quarter; in the wars
between Marius and Sulla as high as 102 shillings, during a great famine under
Augustus to 115 shillings. But these were simply famine prices. On the other
hand, during a year of great plenty near the close of the Second Punic War, the
price was as low as two shillings and eight pence a quarter. A little later,
according to Polybius, it was frequently sold in the valley of the Po for two
shillings and eleven pence a quarter. As between these wide fluctuations it
appears to be admitted that about 21 shillings a quarter was the ordinary
market price. Now, by the legislation of price fixed Caius Gracchus, each
citizen had the right to claim every month a bushel and a quarter of corn from
the public stores for seventeen pence, that is to say at the rate of nine
shillings a quarter, or less than half the average market price. The rest of
the legislation of the younger Gracchus died with him, but this, its worse
feature, remained. When supreme power passed from the Senate and the Assembly
of the People to the Caesars, these latter rulers, though in many respects the
champions of the Provincials against Rome, did not dare to withdraw the
supplies of cheap corn from the citizens, though they did limit—eventually to
200,000 —the number of persons who were entitled thus to purchase it. Gradually
the form of sale and purchase was done away with, and the distribution became
simply gratuitous. By the middle of the second century of our era, the monthly
supplies of corn had been changed for the far more convenient and even more
pauperizing distribution of wheaten loaves, baked perhaps two or three times a week.
When Aurelian
ascended the throne, the loaf which the Roman citizen was thus entitled to
receive (we know not for how many days' consumption), weighed the largess one
uncia (that is 1'1/12) less than two pounds. As he went forth from the gates of
the city on his expedition against the Queen of Palmyra, he announced to the
people that if he should return victorious he would present each one of them
with a crown of two pounds' weight. The citizens expected that these crowns
would be of gold, a donative which was beyond the power and the inclination of
Aurelian. Yet were they not altogether disappointed, for when he had been drawn
in triumph up the Sacred Hill, preceded by the weeping Zenobia, he commanded
that wheaten loaves, shaped like crowns and weighing each two pounds, should be
distributed to the people. Through the remainder of his life and apparently
during the reigns of his successors, these larger loaves were given to those
who possessed the needful tessera or out-door relief
ticket, and this uncia added to the civic rations seems to have been seriously
regarded by the patriotic but ill-advised Emperor as one of his chief titles to
greatness. In writing to Arabianus the Public
Commissary-General (Praefectus Annonae), he says, ‘Of
all the good deeds which by the favor of the Immortal Gods I have wrought for
the Commonwealth none is more splendid than this, that I have increased the
distribution of corn to every citizen by one uncia. To ensure the perpetuity of
this benefit I have appointed more ship-masters for the Nile and for the rivertraffic of Rome. I have raised the banks of the Tiber
and deepened the channel of its headstrong current. I have paid my vows to
Perennity and the other Gods, I have consecrated a statue of the gracious
Ceres. Now be it thy task, my dearest Arabianus, to
see that these arrangements of mine be not unfruitful. For there is nothing in
the world more cheerful than the Roman people when they have well eaten'. This
same Emperor, though fond of repressing what he considered inordinate luxury
(forbidding his wife to wear a silken dress because silk was then worth its
weight in gold, and proscribing the use of gold threads and gilded ceilings,
whereby he considered that a metal which ought to be as plentiful as silver was
unnecessarily wasted), nevertheless added to the rations of the Roman people,
articles which can hardly be considered as of prime necessity. He gave them
pork and oil and wine; at least as to the last gift he had taken measures for
planting extensive vineyards in Etruria, and cultivating them with slave-labor
for the sake of a gratuitous distribution of wine to the citizens, but
according to one story the scheme was frustrated by the intervention of the
Praetorian Prefect who told the generous Emperor that if he gave them wine he
would have to supplement his gifts with roast ducks and chickens. He also gave
them white tunics with long sleeves imported from various provinces of the
Empire, and linen garments from Africa and Egypt. A generous and popular
Emperor doubtless, but Communism thus robed in the purple is an excellent
destroyer of Commonwealths.
Legislation Let
us now traverse an interval of a hundred years, and see what shape this system
of out-door relief had assumed under the dynasty of the Valentinians. A long
Title of the Theodosian code is devoted to the subject. It contains fifteen
laws, chiefly the handiwork of the Emperors Valentinian and Valens, partly of
Theodosius I and his sons. The first point which strikes us is, that Rome no
longer enjoys a monopoly of the often lauded ‘Imperial Munificence.'
Constantine in founding his new capital by the Bosphorus has conferred upon it
also the doubtful boon of the Annona or free largess of corn; and in order to
meet the requirements of this largess, the corn-ships of Alexandria—as was
remarked on a previous occasion—are now diverted from Rome to Byzantium. The
City by the Tiber has now practically only the corn-fields of that province of
which her ancient rival, Carthage, is the capital, to look to for her supplies.
Antioch and Alexandria seem also to have shared in the public distributions,
but the edicts relating to these cities do not appear in the code, possibly
because their largesses were left to be regulated by
the local authorities.
In Rome and
Constantinople the Theodosian code presents us with a lively but strange
picture of this organization of pauperism. Three great classes are the
recipients of that which is called by a courtly fiction ‘the bounty of the
Emperors.' These classes are the Palatini, the Militares,
and the Populares, that is to say, the servants of the palace, the soldiers,
and the mass of the people. The last class receive their rations strictly as
householders. The law is very decided on this point, the rations must follow
the houses; that is to say, if a citizen who has been receiving the ration
alienates his house, he loses the right to his daily loaf. At Constantinople
special stress is laid on the great Founder's desire to encourage
house-building in his new city, and an attempt is made (apparently not a
successful one) to limit even the soldiers' share in the annona to those who possess houses in the capital.
The three
classes seem to have received their rations seated on some of the great public
staircases in which the City of the Seven Hills abounded, and yet abounds. Some
have thought that they were all collected for this purpose in the Colosseum,
but it seems more probable that each of the fourteen Regions of the City had
its own flight of steps on which the applicants seated themselves, as well as
its own bakery, from which they were supplied. Each class of recipients is
mustered apart; the Palatini, the Militares, the
Populares, have each their own tiers of seats. The bread which is distributed
to them is called ‘the Step-Bread' (Panis Gradilis),
and the separate classes are known as ‘Steps.' Stringent laws forbid the
transference of the Panis Gradilis from one ‘Step' to
another, and the Public Commissary-General (Praefectus Annonae) is warned that the severest penalties hang over him, if he suffers
this regulation to be infringed. The prohibition can hardly relate to the mere
physical transportation of a loaf of bread from one stone stair to another. It
probably means that each class of recipients was to be considered as complete
in itself, and that in case of death or removal, the lapsed ration of a
Palatinus was to be transferred only to another Palatinus, that of a Popular is
to another Popularis.
But from such
an inversion of the great industrial the laws upon which Society is founded,
abuse was inseparable. The holders of the Tessera, or
relief-ticket, eager to accept the alms of the State, but anxious to escape
from the ignominy of asking for them, used to present themselves at the great
public bakeries, and there, probably by bribery, obtain the loaves to which
they were entitled. This practice was forbidden, and it was ordained ‘that all
men should receive their step-bread from the steps, and that none should be
handed out by the shopkeepers, lest thereby any fraud should arise concerning
the Panis Gradilis.'
A brazen tablet
was to be affixed to the wall, near to the steps of distribution, and on it the
name of the receiver and the measure of bread due to him were to be engraved.
‘And if any one's impertinence should carry him so far that he shall usurp for
himself or his family the right of that bread, and get his name wrongfully
inserted in the brazen tablet, he shall receive chastisement according to his
condition.'
The meaning of
these last words is made more clear by a savage decree of the Emperor
Valentinian (370). It seems that some of the Senators and great men of Rome
were guilty of the meanness of sending members of their households to receive
this public bread, which was of course intended only for the poorer class of
free citizens. Thereupon the edict runs : ‘Should the steward or slave of any
Senator wrongfully obtain the Panis Gradilis by
direct purchase from the clerk of distribution, or by bribery, or even by his
mere connivance, let such steward or slave be subjected to the torture of the equuleus. If it appears that he was prompted to this
illegality by his own impudence, without the knowledge of his master, let him
serve in chains in that bakery which he has been defrauding. Should, however,
complicity in the offence be traced to his master, let the house of that
Senator be confiscated for the use of the treasury.
‘In other ranks
of life, if any one who is possessed of private resources shall confess the
aforesaid crime, let him and all that he has be bound over to the service of
the bakery.
‘If he shall be
of the very poorest classes'—a provision which shows that this demoralizing
largess did not even answer the purpose of a Poor-law since ‘the very poorest'
were not all entitled to it—‘he shall be forced to labor as if he were a slave.
‘As for the
clerks of distribution who shall be proved to have perpetrated this forbidden
wickedness, the sword which is the vindicator of the laws shall be drawn
against them.'
It would weary
the reader were we to trace in further detail the intricacies of the
legislation concerning the annonae. There are arrangements for changing stale
loaves (sordidi panes) for new, edicts granting a
certain supply of oil to persons designated by the Prefect of the City ‘for the
refreshment of their frames,' edicts forbidding the soldiers of the Imperial
Guard to transmit their right to the ration as a hereditary claim to their
children, and again, other edicts repealing these.
It is a
labyrinth of Imperial legislation, and all leading to what end? To the
maintenance in idleness of the worthless population of four great cities, a
population which every wise legislator would have sought by every means in his
power to divert from the cities, to lead back into the country, to marry to the
land, to raise to something of the dignity of manhood by that wrestling with
Nature for her blessings, which makes up the daily life of Agriculture. But no
: the old legal fiction of the sovereignty of the Roman people still survived,
and therefore the so- called citizen of Rome—the descendant in all probability
of a Syrian or Cappadocian slave— must be allowed to spend his days in lordly
idleness, seeing the charioteers drive, and the gladiators die, and then
presenting himself at the appointed time at the steps of his ‘regio' to receive
his Panis Gradilis from the bounty of the Emperor.
And, to accomplish this desirable end, the administrative energies of the
declining Empire must be weighted with the duties of a vast and complicated
commissariat alike in peace and in war.
5. Destruction of the Middle Class by the fiscal
Oppression of the Curiales.
We have seen
how the social and political system of Rome tended to destroy the free laborers
in the country, and to degrade them in the great cities. We have now to
consider that system of fiscal oppression by which the Empire crushed out the
life of the middle classes in the provincial towns. A great French statesman,
who has treated of this subject with a fullness of knowledge drawn both from
books and from practical politics, considers that this cause was more powerful
than all others in bringing about the ruin of Rome.
The
civilization of the great Republic was essentially a municipal civilization. An
urban community herself, she naturally associated herself with other urban
communities, and wherever her influence has profoundly and permanently modified
the life of any modern people, it will be found that that people is, by choice
and not from the mere force of economic laws, urban in its tastes and its
habits. The towns of Italy and of the provinces possessed, during the ages of
the Republic, very various privileges, and stood in very various relations to
the sovereign City. Some were coloniae, own children
of Rome, some were municipia, stranger towns, gathered within the circle of
‘the Roman friendship or subjection.' But as the power of the Emperors grew,
and as the forms of popular government by assemblies of the citizens at Rome
faded into insignificance, the diversities of privilege between the various
cities of the Empire faded also. Political power was now all gathered up into
one centre, and lodged in the hands of one single
man, the Augustus at Rome, who might delegate it to prefect or vicar, as he
chose. But municipal freedom still existed—that is to say, during the first
three centuries after the Christian era—and municipal power was lodged in the
hands of magistrates, freely chosen by the persons who owned as much as fifteen
acres (twenty-five jugera) in the borough or district
round it. The affairs of the little republic were managed by an assembly
modelled upon the Senate of Rome itself. It was called sometimes the Senate,
sometimes the Curia, and its
members, who
obtained a seat as the Roman Senators did, by filling some office in the State,
were called Decuriones, possibly because there were
originally ten minor Curiae of ten members each, thus furnishing a total of one
hundred members to the Senate. In the large towns, however, this number was
often exceeded. Marquardt points out that at Antioch the number of Decuriones varied from 1200 at its best estate to sixty at
its worst. The sepulchral inscriptions, which we now see in such numbers in the
Italian museums, recording that the dead man was a Decurio of his native town, show that the title was, for several centuries, one which
conferred a certain amount of social distinction on the holder, and we may
perhaps say that the D E C of these Latin epigraphs corresponds to the ESQ. of
an English churchyard.
Thus, during
these early centuries of the Empire, the local government of the towns was both
in name and in fact republican. We need only recur to some familiar examples in
the Acts of the Apostles, to understand how these municipal liberties existed
side by side with the great machine of the Imperial administration, independent
in their own sphere, yet trembling lest by any unauthorized proceeding they
should be brought within its far-reaching and heavy stroke. The Praetors of
Philippi are afraid when their lictors bring them word that the men whom they
have scourged and thrust into prison are Roman citizens. The seven politarchs of Thessalonica are troubled when the mob of
lewd fellows of the baser sort come surging round them, accusing the inmates of
Jason's house of acting contrary to the decrees of Caesar, and teaching that
there is another king, one Jesus. The Recorder of Ephesus is anxious that the
dispute between Paul and the silversmiths should be determined in a legal
manner before the tribunal of the Proconsul of Asia, and that the authorities
of the city should not have to answer difficult interrogatories as to the cause
of the tumultuary assembly in the theatre. Continually we find ourselves in
presence of real and living, though somewhat precarious, forms of local self-government.
The first two
centuries and a half of the Empire may be perhaps considered as the golden age
of the municipalities, and the large amount of prosperity and happiness thus
secured to the middle classes of society was probably the chief cause of the
admitted success of the Imperial administration during the greater part of that
period. Numerous laws were passed in favor of the municipalities. They were
permitted to receive, and probably did receive, large gifts and bequests of
property from their members. Fraud practised upon
them by one of their officials was made equivalent, not to simple theft, but to
the heavier offence of peculation.
The Decurions
were exempted from capital punishment for every crime but that of parricide.
Finally, the municipal treasury, devoted to the construction and maintenance of
great public works, roads, bridges, temples and theatres, and to the
celebration of the solemn public sacrifices, was easily kept full, and had not
as yet attracted the avaricious regards of the Emperors, who ‘found the
treasures of Rome and the ordinary contributions of the provinces suffice for
the needs, and even for the follies, of the central power.'
From the
brightness of this picture some abatement must doubtless be made, as regards
the seventy years of anarchy and confusion which intervened between the death
of Caracalla and the accession of Diocletian (217—284). It is not possible that
when mutiny, rebellion, and civil war were the chronic condition of the Empire,
the municipalities can have enjoyed the full measure of their former
prosperity. But whatever they may have suffered in this way was probably
irregular and exceptional. It could scarcely yet be said, as far as the curiales were concerned, that the throne of the Emperors
was ‘ a throne of iniquity framing mischief by a law.'
This last and
fatal phase in the history of the municipalities was probably, in great
measure, the result of the remodelling of the Empire
by Diocletian. That great statesman saw that some change was needed if the
Empire was not to be rent asunder by the hands of its own children. The changes
which he accordingly introduced have been already briefly described.
These changes
answered their immediate purpose. The Roman Empire was held together for
another century and a half, but it gained life at the cost of the means of
living. According to the old fable, Phaethon, when entrusted with the chariot
of the Sun-god, drove it too near to the earth and began rapidly to dry up all
the pools and fountains of waters. Even so now, the Imperial Majesty, of which
flatterers had made a kind of god upon earth, appearing in all the vigor of its
new administrative powers close to every portion of the Empire, began at once
to dry up many a reservoir of wealth which had escaped the rapacity of former
Emperors. Especially was this true of the funds hitherto devoted to the
purposes of local self-government. These, which the Curiae had hitherto not
only raised, but administered, were now diverted to the Imperial Exchequer to
provide for the pomp of the palace, the salaries of the swarms of new
officials, and the donatives to the legions, while the strictly useful and
reproductive expenditure on roads and bridges, and other local needs, fell day
by day into abeyance.
In the happier
days of the municipalities, plenty of citizens had generally been found ready
and anxious to discharge, even at some cost to themselves, the civic functions
of their little republics. The example of England, and still more that of
America, proves that where there exists a large and flourishing middle class,
endowed with local self-government, money is for the most part freely
forthcoming for the wants of the community. When the State is at peace, that
healthy emulation which exists between citizens, and that desire to emerge from
the ranks, which is natural to men, leads one to build a bridge, another to
establish a library, a third to endow a school, a fourth to spend lavishly on
the duties of his mayoralty, and so on. The same disposition had, no doubt,
existed in the Curiae throughout the Roman Empire. But now a new competitor for
the generosity of the citizens appeared in the shape of the Christian Church,
perpetually increasing the sumptuousness of her worship, perpetually widening
the sphere of her duties as public almoner, and, for both objects, claiming and
receiving large oblations from the wealthy. The parish now competed with the
Curia, and the benevolent citizen who would have built an aqueduct in the
second century, founded a church in the third.
And
simultaneously with this new diversion of the funds of the charitable, the
great Imperial mendicant drew nigh to the impoverished Curia, but speaking now
with an altered tone, and saying no longer ‘If you like', but ‘You must.' We
see the results of the pressure which now began to be put upon the
municipalities, but the exact manner of its working does not seem to be
disclosed to us. An impost called the ‘Aurum Coronarium,'
which had once been purely a free-will offering occasionally given by the
cities to the Roman generals, was now a regular tax paid by the Decurions as
such, and by them only. The other taxes, which were assessed afresh every
fifteen years throughout the whole Empire, were levied upon the Curia in its
collective capacity, and if any member made default, his fellow-decurions must
make good the deficiency.
Under the
pressure of this continually-increasing taxation, some lands, went out of
cultivation altogether, since there was no profit left for the proprietor after
the claims of the State were satisfied. So much the more taxes must the
surrounding proprietors pay, to make up for the loss to the treasury from those
unsown acres. It is evident that when once this process had reached a certain
stage, the load of taxation on the proprietors who still endeavored to bear it
would increase, not in arithmetical, but in geometrical proportion, and life
would become nothing but a cruel race between the tax-collector and his victim.
The inevitable
result followed. The Curiae, which had once been honored and envied
communities, easily bearing the weight of their public duties, ind dispensing comfort and happiness to the district round
them, were now mere gaols in which the middle classes
were shut up from birth till death, to toil for the Imperial Treasury. The
dignity of Decurion, or curialis as he was now often
called, was no longer bestowed on the most worthy by the suffrages of his
fellow-citizens. It was a charge descending from the father to the son, which the
son, however anxious to be freed from it, could not renounce. The longest ‘titl ' (as it is called) in the Theodosian Code, is that
which contains the 188 laws, passed during 150 years, concerning the rights and
duties of the Decurions. Of their rights perhaps eight laws speak, of their
duties the remaining 180, and that in tones of inflexible severity. The
perpetually recurring expression, ‘the son of a Curial must be bound to the
Curia,' formulated as it is with the word mancipetur,
which we know so well by its opposite, emancipation, shows sufficiently how
grievous a burden the service of the municipalities was considered. It is true
that more than once we meet with a proviso that no one is to be condemned to
enter the ranks of the Decurions as a punishment. ‘The splendor of the Curiae'
is said to be dear to the Imperial heart, and ‘a criminal should be visited
with punishment, not with an accession of dignity'; but this hypocritical pretence can deceive no one who reads the laws by which
this enactment is preceded and followed, and who sees therein the perpetual
struggle of the middle classes to escape from their connection with the Curiae,
and the ruthless determination with which Emperors and Prefects force them back
into that hateful prison-house.
No provincial
governor on his own authority might excuse a Decurion from his municipal
obligations on the score of poverty. The Emperor reserved to himself alone the
exercise of this prerogative. Small, certainly, was the probability that a
citizen, too poor to pay his curial dues, would be able to defray the expense
of a journey to Rome in order to obtain this exemption. And yet their chronic
misery may have urged many to undertake this painful pilgrimage, for we find
another edict whereby they were forbidden to visit the Emperor on public or
private business without the leave of the Governor of the Province in which
they dwelt. The prohibition went further : they were forbidden to take any kind
of journey, lest they should defraud the Curia of their services, and for the
same reason they were forbidden to leave the cities and take up their residence
in the country. That free circulation of the citizens, which makes the life of
modern states, was a crime in the eyes of the Imperial legislator, because it
interfered with his machinery of fiscal extortion.
Nothing gives
us a more convincing proof of the utterly unbearable condition of the Curiales than the continual efforts which they made to
divest themselves of their status, and the storm of Imperial edicts by which
they were constantly met and driven back into their Curiae. In truth, the whole
series of this legislation seems like an attempt to compress an incompressible
fluid, or in some similar way to violate the fundamental laws of physics.
The Decurion
was not to be allowed to rise into the profession of an advocate, lest he
should thereby obtain exemption from his curial obligations; for the same
reason he was not to be allowed to descend into the guild of the
rag-collectors; nor should he be permitted to farm the taxes of the province,
lest in case of his default, the Emperor and the Curia might find themselves
opposing creditors of a bankrupt estate. If a Decurion married a female slave,
as the offspring of such a marriage would be incapable of representing him in
the Curia, he himself was to be banished to a distant island, his slave-wife to
be sent to work in the mines, and his property to pass to his next of kin, upon
whom would devolve his obligations to the Curia.
It might have
been thought that when every Teutonic and Scythian nationality from the Caspian
to the Scheldt was pouring down upon the Empire, when the Romans were
‘Ringed around with
barking dogs of war,’
the mustering of men for
the battlefield would have been an object of primary importance with their
rulers, and that if an oppressive conscription were not resorted to, at least
every volunteer would be eagerly welcomed. By no means : the maintenance of the
Curia, as a taxing-machine in a state of efficiency, was the first
consideration, for upon this depended the splendor of the Imperial household,
and the rapid fortunes of Prefects and Counts.
To escape from
the misery of their lot as bondslaves of a bankrupt municipality, the
Decurions, who were legally bound to serve in a kind of local force, the militia cohortalis, thronged in multitudes into the
regular army, the militia armata. Law after
law was passed with tedious reiteration, forbidding the officers to enlist any
man who is under curial obligations, prescribing the form in which each recruit
is to declare his freedom from such liability, and insisting on the dragging
back into the Curia of such Decurions as might after all have crept through all
this mesh-work of opposing edicts into the army. True, if any had already
served for fifteen years in the army, he was to be safe from further pursuit
but then, on the other hand, look at this provision, ‘If any man of military
descent shall enlist in the militia cohortalis,
and if, with strength yet unbroken, he shall put forward the plea of advanced
age, or by reason of weakness shall be judged unfit for the work of war, he
shall be drawn forth from the lurking- place of his cowardice, and bound over
to the duties of the Curiae.' The bondage of the Curia—that was the Chelsea
Hospital which Rome provided for her broken-down soldiers in the year 380 under
the auspices of Theodosius.
The Church as
well as the Army offered a door of or even the escape from Curial obligations.
We are not surprised at finding the Pagan Emperor Julian closing this door and
decreeing that ‘Decurions, who as Christians' [whereby clergymen are probably
intended] ‘decline the offices of their township, are to be recalled.' But if
any different strain of legislation was hoped for from a pious Emperor like
Theodosius, the Convener of the Second Council, the glory and defence of the Catholic Church, such hopes were doomed to
disappointment.
‘Those Curiales,' says he, ‘who prefer to serve the Churches
rather than their Curiae, if they wish to be that which they simulate, let them
scorn to withdraw their property from the service of their country. For we will
certainly not liberate them on any other condition than this, that they
renounce their patrimonies. Since it is not becoming that souls which are
devoted to the contemplation of God should feel any regret at the loss of their
ancestral property' (383).
It is true that
some years later (390) an exemption is made on behalf of those who have already
entered the ranks of the clergy. ‘He who before the second Consulship of my
Mildness' [the mildness of him who in that very year ordered the massacre at
Thessalonica] ‘has reached the eminence of Presbyter, or undertaken the
ministry of Deacon, or the office of Exorcist, may keep all his patrimony safe
and free from curial bonds. But he who, under whatever name, shall have betaken
himself to the religious ministrations of divine worship after the date of my
aforesaid Consulship, let him know that he must give up the whole of his
patrimony'. Other laws, of an earlier as well as a later date than those which
have been quoted, enacted that the curial Cleric should be withdrawn from his
sacred profession and restored to the civic duties from which he had absconded.
Such a provision, which shows that the ecclesiastical hierarchy, however
powerful, was still far from occupying the position which she held in the days of
Hildebrand, must surely have clashed against even the then existing Canons of
the Church. No instances however seem to be forthcoming, to show in what way
this conflict of laws was settled.
The monks, if Curiales. were handled by the State even more roughly than
the clergy. It should be stated however that the decree which is next to follow
was issued by the Emperor Valens, who, as an Arian, had special reasons for
hating the enthusiastically Athanasian monks of Egypt at whom it is principally
aimed (365).
‘Certain lovers
of idleness, deserting their civic duties, affect solitary and secret places,
and under the guise of religion are collected together with the assemblies of
the Lonely-Livers (Monazontes). We have therefore, on
deliberation, commanded that all these, and men like them, if taken in Egypt,
shall be drawn forth from their hiding-places by the Count of the East, and
shall be recalled to undergo the charges of their native districts, or else, by
virtue of this law, shall be deprived of the delights of their possessions,
which, it is our pleasure, shall be claimed by those who have to undertake the
charge of the public functions.'
Besides the
Church and the Army another career, if he only could succeed in entering it,
seemed to promise to the aspiring Curial an exemption from the crushing load of
municipal liability. This was service in the vast Imperial households, for the
Palatinus of whatever rank was not only entitled, as has been already seen, to
share in the corn-largesses; he was also, as the
servant of the Emperor, ‘free from mancipation' to
any other master. And in this way, no doubt, many thousands of Decurions
managed to evade the onerous obligations of local self-government. There is a
long series of vacillating decrees bearing on the case of these men. According
to one edict thirty years' prescription was necessary, according to others,
five years sufficed, to prevent the dreaded sentence, ‘Let him be dragged back
to his Curia.' The general impression left on the mind by these decrees is that
they soon became waste parchment, the theory of government requiring that the
rights of the Curia should be insisted upon, while in practice the favor of the
Sovereign was powerful enough to shield from curial pursuit the members of his
household. Theodosius (or Valentinian II), however, once breaks forth into a
strain of sublime indignation against those who trusted to this means of
deliverance (386). ‘Let the Curiales who have
supposed that they could be defended by the privilege of our Household be
dragged back to their Curia, so that they may be “mancipated”
to their proper functions and may repair the public losses. Nevertheless if any
of these shall be proved to owe anything to our Divine household, let him pay
it'. This noble sacrifice by the Emperor of everybody else to the necessities
of the country, coupled with the sharpest attention to the interests of his own
‘divine household,' is characteristic of the legislation of that period.
From this
general survey of the laws relating to the Decurions it will be seen that we
have here a state of things not altogether unlike that which existed in France
before the Revolution. A court and a noblesse above, exempt from, the heaviest
part of the national taxation, and with their hands for ever in the national
exchequer: below, a people robbed and spoiled, taillable et corveable a merci, that is, without mercy and
without foresight, and consequently some of the most fertile countries in the
world brought by the tax-gatherer to the verge of starvation. The difference
between the two cases is that in France taille and corvee reached down to the
very lowest of the people: in the Roman Empire, the slaves and the ‘plebeians'
(as the class of freemen who lacked the curial qualification were called) were
not shut up in the taxing-pen of the Curia. It was essentially an oppression of
the middle classes that was thus carried on; but a century and a half of this
steady, persevering tyranny had so ground down the once prosperous and thriving
Decurions, that it may be doubted whether they were not, when the Western
Empire fell, practically lower than the lowest of the proletariat.
M. Guizot
mentions two privileges which were left to the Curiales,
and which, he thinks, may have been some slight compensation for their many
miseries.
1. Freedom from
Corporal Punishment. We find certainly several laws which appear to concede
this privilege to the Decurions. Especially is it forbidden to chastise them
with the Plumbatae, the scourge with lumps of metal
knotted into its thongs, which was ordinarily used for the chastisement of
slaves. One remarkable law, passed in the year 381, says, ‘Let all Judges and
Governors of Provinces abstain from usurping a power which does not belong to
them, and let them know that absolutely no Principalis nor Decurion, whatever fault or error he may have committed, to be submitted to
the torments of the Plumbatae. Should perchance any
judge hereafter break forth into such pertinacity of forbidden madness as to
dare to subject a Principalis and a Decurion, a man
who is, so to speak, the Senator of his Curia, to the strokes of the Plumbatae, let him be condemned to pay a fine of twenty
pounds of gold (800), and branded with perpetual infamy so that not even a
special rescript of our own shall suffice to remove the stigma. The officer who
has administered the chastisement shall be forced to pay a fine of fifty pounds
of gold inasmuch as, the command of the judge being unlawful, we give him full
liberty to disobey it'. This lawgiver seems to be in earnest, and the provision
for inflicting a heavier fine on the actual wielder of the lash than on his
master seems cleverly contrived to prevent the perpetration of the outrage. But
one may doubt, from the frequent reappearance of similar provisions in the
Code, whether the immunity from stripes—which was, after all, theoretically the
privilege of every Roman citizen—was practically enjoyed by ‘the Decurion, the
Senator of his Curia.' For by later edicts (387 and 392) Theodosius expressly
enacts that Decurions, who have been guilty of malversation in respect of the
public monies, or ‘who owe anything '—a category which would of course include
those whose taxes were in arrear— may be punished with the Plumbatae.
As in Egypt at the present day the bastinado, applied to the elders of the
village, extracts the intolerable tax from the unfortunate fellah, so
doubtless, many a time, in the last century of the Empire, did the cruel blows
of the Plumbatae wring the last denarius out of the
coffers of the Decurion.
2 A more
substantial privilege doubtless, though from its nature attainable by few, was
the prospect of entering the Senate, and so passing from the class of the
oppressed into that of the oppressors. An inhabitant of one of the more
important municipalities, who was possessed of large means, and had steadily
climbed the ladder of official dignities in his native town, having finally
attained the rank of presiding Duumvir, was to be considered free from all
further curial obligations, to hold the rank of an Ex-Count, and with the title
of clarissimus, had the right of a seat in the
innermost circle at the public games, and the Governor of the Province was
bound to salute him with a kiss. Last and most important, an entrance was
permitted him into the Roman Senate, ‘the noblest Curia of all,' but apparently
on condition of his leaving a son, or some other substitute, to represent him
in the Curia from which he emerged.
Often it would
occur that a wealthy and popular Curial, by official favor or by bribing his
fellow-townsmen, would succeed in missing some steps of the slow ascent, and
would present himself in the Senate-house at Rome before he was duly qualified.
In such a case, said the Emperor Constantius (361)—‘The Decurions who shirk
their own duties and betake themselves to the fellowship of our Senate shall be
struck off the roll of that body, and “mancipated” to
their own cities. Those, however, who have served ‘the office of Praetor'
[which involved heavy expenses in connection with the Praetorian games
exhibited to the people] ‘may remain in the Senate, but must restore any monies
which they may have abstracted from our Imperial Exchequer, or from the bowels
of the municipalities'. Many similar laws follow, some of which ingeniously
fasten on such premature Senators a double pecuniary obligation, first as
Curial, and, second, as Senator. A yet harsher tone is observable in the
following law, passed in the year 398 by Arcadius, Emperor of the East.
‘All the Curiales are to abide in their original Curies, their
duties to which are of perpetual obligation. Those who by fraud or popular
canvassing have clambered up into the place of high Administrators and Rulers
of Provinces, are to be at once deprived of the honors which they have
obtained, and not only with swift and strong hand drawn back to their own
Curia, and made to serve all its offices from the very beginning, but shall
also be mulcted in half their patrimony.' But, by an edict which was published
shortly after, these stringent provisions were somewhat modified in the case of
a Curial who had obtained senatorial rank ‘before the Ides of November, in the
fourth Consulship of Lord Honorius Augustus, Brother of my Eternity, and his
colleague Eutychianus.'
‘Brother of my
Eternity', such was the pompous style in which the imbecile Arcadius spoke of
the imbecile Honorius. It was time for our Teutonic kinsman, Alaric, to tear
down the purple hangings of Empire, and let in the fresh air of reality upon
those chambers reeking with flattery and falsehood.
One last
exemption must be noticed, which points to the dwindling state of the
population of the Provinces, but which rests on a basis of humanity and good
sense. It was enacted by the Emperor Julian (363), ‘He who is the father of
thirteen children not only shall not be summoned to the Curia, but even though
he be a Decurion, shall be left in an honored rest' [undisturbed by the summons
to undertake any curial duty].
From the
sketch, necessarily brief and imperfect, which has been here given of the
decline and fall of the Municipalities of the Empire, the reader can in some
degree estimate for himself the share which their altered condition had in
bringing about the ruin of the Empire itself. In Gaul, in Spain, in Italy, the
exhaustion and impoverishment of the middle classes was, in the fifth century,
so great that it had become a matter almost of indifference who ruled over
them, a grandson of Theodosius, the Suevic Count Ricimer, the Herulian Odovacar, or Theodoric the Ostrogoth. Their
condition could not be worse under the barbarian than under the crushing,
organized, relentless tyranny of the Roman bureaucracy. It might be, and as far
as Odovacar and Theodoric were concerned it probably was, better.
In the East no
doubt the same process of exhaustion went on, but the fortunate push from
without was wanting. In Egypt and in Syria the Arabs, fresh from the desert,
easily overturned, amid shouts of Lo Ellah il Allah! the pallid resemblances of
Graeco-Roman municipalities. In the other provinces of the Byzantine Empire
they still cumbered the ground with the spectacle of their decay until the
close of the ninth century, when Leo VI, surnamed the Philosopher, removed from
the theory of the constitution both the Senate of the Empire and the Curiae of
the towns. Of the latter he said, ‘The ancient laws passed as to the Curiae and
Decurions impose on the Decurions intolerable burdens, and confer on the Curiae
the right to nominate certain magistrates, and to govern the cities by their
own authority. Now that civil affairs have taken another form, and that all
things depend entirely on the care and government of the Imperial Majesty,
these laws wander, so to speak, vainly and without object, around the soil of
legality. We therefore abolish them by the present decree.’
In the West,
the agony of the Municipia had been shorter, and the remembrance of the days of
their prosperity and usefulness was therefore less easily effaced. It would be
an interesting task, but one outside of our present field, to show how, under
the barbarian kings, aided in many cases by the influence of the Church, the
Curiae rose again, as it were, from the tomb, until, in the twelfth,
thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, local self-government, as set forth in
the Italian Commune, reached, perhaps, the noblest elevation at which the world
has seen, or is likely to see it. An almost equally noteworthy tribute to the
memory of the old municipal organization is paid from a different quarter. To
this day the mightiest ecclesiastical organization in the world, that which
gives birth to Popes, and defies or bargains with Emperors, calls itself the
Roman Curia.
6. Barbarous Finance.
The Local
Taxation of the Empire has been dwelt upon at considerable length, because its
history can be easily traced from the Statute Book, and because in tracing that
history we can clearly see a powerful degrading influence at work upon an
important class of the community.
The history of
the Imperial Taxation is in some respects more obscure, and to give a detailed
description of it would require more space than can here be afforded. But,
tried by its results, it may without hesitation be condemned as wasteful,
oppressive, and, in one word, barbarous. The more one examines into the subject
the more one is convinced that great as the Romans were in legislation, and
great in war, in finance their genius was below mediocrity. To violently wrest
the whole or a large part of the lands of a conquered people from their former
owners and appropriate them to the Roman State, to destroy great seats of
industry and commerce like Corinth or Carthage, and bring their gold and silver
and works of art home to figure in a Roman triumph, this easy system of
momentary self-enrichment the Senate and its officers were able to put in
practice. But to develop, as some of the Ptolemies and some of the Tudors
developed, the commercial wealth of their people, to plant wisely and water
diligently the tree of manufacturing or agricultural prosperity, from which the
State itself might in the time of fruit-bearing pluck a golden reward, this was
a kind of enterprise for which the genius of the Roman nation was little
suited, and though it cannot be said to have been never attempted, it certainly
seldom succeeded in Roman hands.
It is
unfortunately quite impossible to determine with any approach to accuracy the
amount of the revenue of the Empire, but the conjectures of scholars who have
examined carefully into the subject point to a sum of between £20,000,000 and
£30,000,000 sterling as the probable total under the Emperors. It is true that
we cannot say what amount of local taxation may have existed side by side with
this. But in itself the amount does not seem a crushing weight for a population
of perhaps 90,000,000, inhabiting such countries as France, Spain, and Italy
are now, as Turkey in Europe, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, and the northern shore
of Africa were before the domination of the Mussulman had blasted them. It is
difficult to resist the conclusion that a modern scientific financier, keeping
a wise equipoise between direct and indirect taxation, and carefully arranging
his duties so as to take only a reasonable toll from the vast commerce of the
Mediterranean countries, could have easily provided for the State a revenue twice
as large as she seems to have actually received, without crushing out the
happiness of her subjects.
But the Roman
financiers seem to have relied most on the worst kind of taxation, and to have
levied it in the most wasteful and oppressive manner. Unfortunately we have no
specimen of the budget of a Count of the Sacred Largesses'
which we can submit to a modern Chancellor of the Exchequer for his criticisms.
But it is almost certain that the portoria or customs
duties, varying from 2 to 5 per cent., and ultimately reaching as high as 12
per cent., did not contribute an important part of the revenues of the Empire.
The Vicesima Hereditatum, a
succession duty of 5 per cent., seems to have been enforced with some
hesitation, and to have been finally abandoned in the sixth century on account
of its unpopularity. Yet as the duty was not paid when the property devolved
upon very near relations, few taxes, one would think, could have been more
easily justified, or should have been more inflexibly demanded. The Vicesima Libertatis, a tax of 5
per cent, on the value of every liberated slave, was probably, in the existing
state of Roman society, a wise impost, as tending to prevent the dilution of
the ranks of Roman citizens by too large an accession of freedmen, and it
brought in a considerable revenue to the State. It was, moreover, essentially a
tax on luxuries, for to be surrounded by a troop of obsequious freedmen was one
of the most common forms of ostentation among the Roman nobility. But when we
read in the pages of Juvenal, Athenaeus, and Tacitus, of the portentous and
childish expenditure of that nobility on other luxuries, we see that here was a
field from which a modern financier would have reaped an abundant harvest. He
would not have issued sumptuary edicts nor attempted by legislation to check
the torrent of extravagance, but he would have said in fact to these men, the
owners of half a province and the lords of an army of slaves, ‘Since it pleases
you to spend such vast sums on all sorts of ridiculous fantasies, spend them by
all means, but give the State a share of your superfluity.' The Licenses and Assessed
Taxes which an English minister of Finance would have imposed upon the Roman
Senators would have fed many Legions.
But the
sheet-anchor of the Imperial Financier was evidently the share, the oppressive
share, of produce which they wrested from the cultivator of the soil. In some
countries this had been originally looked upon as Land-Tax properly so called,
in others it had been treated as Rent for land appropriated by the Roman people
but suffered to remain in the possession of the former owners as their tenants.
In some it had been originally a Tithe (Decumae), in
others it had been spoken of as Tribute (Tributum Soli). But it will probably be safe to say that these differences had now, in
the fourth and fifth centuries, become mere matters of antiquarian interest.
The various populations of the Empire, Italian and Provincial, Greek and
Sicilian, Asiatic and African, were all now theoretically free and practically
miserable. Every fifteen years, that great revision of taxable value, called
the Indiction, took place throughout the Empire. Then
the few who had prospered found themselves assessed on the higher value which
their lands had acquired, while the many who were sinking down into poverty,
obtained, it is to be feared, but little relief from taxation on account of the
higher rate which was charged to all. They might be assessed on fewer capita,
but each caput was larger on account of the increasing needs of the Imperial
Exchequer. This periodical re-assessment was evidently one of the most
important features of the inner life of the Empire, and was aptly expressed by
the habit of dating each year from its place in the Indiction.
In the
breathless race between the tax-payer and the tax-gatherer which financial
administration became during the decay of the Empire, the inherent vices of the
Roman system of collecting the revenue grew more and more apparent. Whether
because the Republic despaired of finding absolutely honest collectors among
her own citizens, because she deemed it impossible for anything but the keen
self-interest of a contractor to cope with the self-interest of the cultivator
of the land, or because the simplicity of an auction of the taxes commended
itself to the rude fiscal notions of her statesmen—whatever may have been the
cause, certain it is that the Tithes and all other forms of Land-Tax seem to
have been, from the beginning to the end of the Roman domination, farmed out to
men who bore the well-known and hated name of publicani.
Many familiar passages in the New Testament show the aversion with which the
subordinate ranks of this great corporation were regarded by the provincials.
An often-quoted passage in Livy shows that the Senate itself, at a
comparatively early period, had perceived that the vast powers for extortion
wielded by the Publicans were quite incompatible with the existence of real
liberty among the subject-allies of Rome. Finlay, the historian of Greece, has
traced in many pages of his history the disastrous effect of the system of
tithes and tithe farming upon both Greece and Turkey, and speaks of this
system as an undoubted legacy, and a fatal one, from the Roman Empire. If we
had the materials in our possession for a complete picture of the financial
administration of Constantine or Theodosius, we should no doubt find that the
wasteful oppression of the publicanus was the main
cause why so large an amount of suffering among the peasantry produced,
comparatively, so small a revenue to the State.
The phenomena
of commercial life in classical antiquity are not easy to understand. We are
told that pressure of banking business had reached a high development both in
Greece and Italy; that bills of exchange were constantly drawn and remitted
from one part of the Empire to another; that the bankers (argentarii)
were in the habit of receiving money on deposit, and relending it on overdrawn
account. And yet, on the other hand, we hear constantly of exorbitant sums
being paid for interest. Twelve-and-a-half per cent, is mentioned as a frequent
rate in Rome, and twenty-four per cent, as charged in Sicily. The latter rate,
it is true, was exacted by the tyrannical Verres, but it is far surpassed by
the righteous Brutus, who exacted forty-eight per cent, from the provincials of
Cyprus. At all times of the Republic and Empire aes alienum (borrowed money) is spoken of as a
fruitful source of danger to the State, and the debtor never seems to have a
fair chance of emancipating himself from the yoke of the creditor. These are
all indications of a state of things in which the usurer rather than the banker
is the chief loanmonger, and they almost entitle us
to say (whatever indications to the contrary may be afforded by scattered
passages in the classics) that the true business of a banker—the acting as a
broker between those classes of the community which desire to lend and those
classes which desire to borrow—cannot have been understood, or if understood,
cannot have been widely practised in the Roman
Empire.
It would be an
interesting speculation to enquire what would have been the effect of a
National Debt—that distinguishing feature of modern political finance—in
retarding or accelerating the ruin of the Empire. The First and Second Punic
Wars seem to have been fought out to a successful issue by the Senate chiefly
by means of a loan, disguised under a gigantic debasement of the currency. The
As, which was then the unit of monetary value, and which was coined out of a
pound of copper when the quarrel with Carthage commenced, consisted of only one
uncia, (the twelfth part of a pound,) when the dispute was settled, sixty-
three years later, on the field of Zama. The disastrous effect of such a
sweeping alteration in the standard of value was perhaps mitigated by the
partial substitution of a silver currency for one of copper. But though the
State had thus made a disguised loan from its subjects, and though at times it
may have borrowed inconsiderable sums of money for short periods from the publicani, no such institution as a permanent National Debt
ever existed, or perhaps ever suggested itself as possible to the State
Financiers. On some great emergencies, such as the reception of the Visigothic
refugees within the limits of the Empire in 376, a loan on a large scale might
have been a prudent and statesmanlike measure. The secure investment thus
offered to those provincials who were shut out from the great money markets of
Rome and Alexandria, might have stimulated thrift. And it is almost certain
that the rulers of the Empire, had they periodically appeared before their
subjects as borrowers, would have been more amenable to the legitimate
influence of public opinion. Flatterers might persuade a frantic debauchee that
he was pious, and unconquered, and fortunate, up to the very moment when he was
ripe for assassination; but a decline in the Imperial Funds of ten per cent,
would have been an unmistakable proof that he was losing the confidence of his
subjects.
Arguments like
these might be advanced to show that the existence of the Empire would have
been prolonged by the device of national indebtedness. On the other hand, we
see, by abundant evidence in the history of our own times, that the creation of
Bonds and Stock certificates is like dram-drinking to imperfectly organized
States. The brief military usurpers of the third century would probably have
raised loans on the national credit as furiously and as foolishly as the
Presidents of any South American Republic. And even as to the great and stable
States of modern times whose acknowledgments of debt command, and rightly
command, for the present, as high a price as the land itself, the substratum of
all national wealth, we must remember that we have as yet traced their orbit
through a very small part of the World's History. We and our immediate
forefathers have seen the beginning of England's borrowing, but we know not in
what spirit our remote descendants may look upon its end.
7. Causes, or Symptoms, of Decay.
It is time to
bring to a conclusion this examination of the causes of the Fall of the Roman
Empire, which might range over the whole field of private and public life
during the first four Christian centuries.
Some readers
may be surprised at not finding a prominent place among those causes given to
the autocratic power of the Caesars. Many instances have been noticed, even in
the course of this history, in which a fatuous or vicious Emperor accelerated
the ruin of Rome. But, upon a survey of the whole history of the Commonwealth
before and after the consolidation of the supreme power in the hands of an
Imperator, it does not seem possible to look upon that measure as anything else
than preservative of the life of the State. We have to compare the Imperial
System, not with some ideal Republic of Plato or More, not even with a modern
European monarchy of average excellence, but with the Roman Republic during the
last century and a half of its existence, at a time when the government of the
fairest portion of the earth was in the hands of a combination of aristocrats
the most selfish, and of democrats the most senseless, that the world has
perhaps ever seen, and was being jobbed and plundered for their apparent
benefit with such blind rapacity that, had Caesar not arrested the process of
destruction, the provincial population must have perished in the grasp of its
oppressors.
But though,
upon the whole, the power of the Emperors was exerted beneficially for the Empire,
the same cannot be said of the frequent and disastrous imperia interference of
the Imperial household in State affairs. While, on the one hand, there were
long intervals, notably the reigns of the Adoptive Emperors, perhaps also those
of Diocletian and Constantine, during which a wise and well-organized
bureaucracy (to use a modern term) gave effect to the mandates of the Supreme
Power, there were other periods, especially the reigns of Claudius, of
Constantius, of the sons and grandsons of Theodosius, during which the personal
attendants of the Monarch, his freedmen, or even his eunuchs, succeeded in
grasping the helm of the State, and their steering was uniformly disastrous.
The confusion between the menial servants of the Monarch and the ministers of
the Empire, though obvious in a constitutionally-governed country, generally
tends to efface itself under a despotism, where the Sovereign, daily fed upon
such flatteries as those which Claudian offered to Honorius, comes in time to
believe that the trivialities of his daily life are matters of profound
interest to his subjects, and as important to the world as the welfare of
provinces. Thus it was, by playing upon the weakness of a master whom in their
hearts they despised, that such men as Eutropius became the chief depositaries
of power under such sovereigns as Arcadius; thus it was that they could sell
the highest offices in the Empire, and bitterly revenge the wrongs which they
themselves had suffered in their former bondage. Whatever may be the drawbacks
of a constitutional system, and they are many, it at least nullifies, if it
does not destroy, the baneful influence of the Household in politics. A
vigorous and hard-working Bureaucrat, who finds himself eclipsed or thwarted by
a showy and pretentious speaker in a popular assembly, may reflect that even
this is less humiliating than the necessity of courting the favor of an
uneducated domestic, who has risen into power by the performance of menial
offices in the bedchamber of the Sovereign.
The rapid and
terrible decline in the efficiency of the Army was without doubt another potent
cause of the dissolution of the Empire. When we hear the military essayist,
Vegetius, lamenting the effeminate habits of the soldiers in his day, who were
no longer able to bear the weight of helmet and coat of mail, and petitioned
the Emperor, with success, that they might be allowed to lay aside these
wearisome defenses, we feel how vast a change has come over the spirit of the
legionary since the hardy Sabine and Marsian followed
Caesar to victory. This demoralization may be partly due, as Zosimus says it
was, to the truckling policy of Constantine, who withdrew many of the legions
from the arduous and unpopular duty of defending the frontiers and quartered
them in the large cities of the Empire, where they spent their days at the
Amphitheatre, and their nights in debauchery, a burden on the peaceful
provincials, but no longer a terror to the enemies of Rome.
But the true
causes of the ruin of that wonderful machine of conquest, the Roman Army, lay
deeper doubtless than in any such special mistake of military administration as
this of Constantine's. Its mainspring for centuries had been the patient
strength and courage, the capacity for enduring hardness, the instinctive
submission to military discipline, of the populations which lined the ranges of
the Apennines. Taught by their example, other races in the Empire, especially
the Gauls and the friendly Germans, could do good
service as foederati or even as actual legionaries. But after all, when the old
Italian population itself was gone— and we have seen some of the economic
changes which led to its disappearance before the slave-gangs of the great
proprietors of Italy—there was no more reason left why the Roman army should
continue to conquer.
The wolves of
Romulus were changed into the timid sheep of Honorius and the younger
Theodosius. What had been the hammer of the nations became now their anvil.
Simple
depopulation is often assigned as a cause of the fall of the Empire. And with
great truth, especially so far as the terrible plagues and earthquakes of the
second and third centuries contributed to that depopulation. It is abundantly
clear, and must have been, observed by the attentive reader of this history,
that there were vast solitary spaces within the border of the
Empire when the
barbarians streamed across it, and that their movement was one of colonization
almost as much as of conquest. Still, when one looks at the whole course of
affairs after the Romans had made themselves masters of the countries bordering
on the Mediterranean, depopulation seems to present itself to the mind as a
symptom rather than a cause of the malady which was in time to prove fatal, and
one is inclined to fix upon some of the vices of the Roman polity mentioned
above, the slave-system, the latifundia, the extortion of the tax-gatherer, as
the reasons for that terrible failure of ‘the human harvest.'
The ruin of
such a mighty fabric as the world-empire fail of Rome can hardly be
contemplated by the citizen of any State such as our own, which has extended
its dominion over alien peoples and far distant lands, without stirring some
foreboding fears that of our country too it may one day be said, ‘How art thou
fallen from Heaven, oh Lucifer, Son of the Morning!'. Even so, according to the
well-known story, the younger Africanus, in the very midst of the ruined city
of Carthage, which he had himself destroyed, shed prophetic tears over the fate
of his own country, and repeated those verses of the Iliad—
‘ Surely a day
shall come for the fall of Ilion the holy,
Priam, the
stout-speared king, and all the people of Priam.'
But an
Englishman, though his presumption may rightly be chastened by the thought of
the mortality of Rome, may derive some comfort from the reflection that she was
tempted, as his country is not, by absolutely unbounded success. It was not
till after the destruction of Carthage that the worst qualities of the Roman
conqueror, his rapacity, his cruelty, his contempt for the rights of others
began to develop themselves. The other powerful nations, both in the Old and
the New World, which act as a counterpoise to our own, and sometimes administer
a severe rebuke to our national pride, are in truth our best friends,
preserving us from that overweening arrogance which is unendurable by God and
Man.
Of the causes
enumerated above, which conspired for the ruin of the Empire, some clearly
affect us not. The Christian religion is with us no explosive force threatening
the disruption of our most cherished institutions. On the contrary it has been
said, not as a mere figure of speech, that ‘ Christianity is part of the common
law of England.' And even the bitterest enemies of our religion will scarcely
deny that, upon the whole, a nation imbued with the teaching of the New
Testament is more easy to govern than one which derived its notions of divine
morality from the stories of the dwellers on Olympus.
The partition
of the Empire, the erection of a coequal seat of authority in its Asiatic
dependencies, can hardly be considered a danger for us in practical politics.
Slavery is not
eating as a canker into the heart of the English State. Yet perhaps there may
be something analogous to slavery in the condition of ‘the dangerous classes'
in our great cities, men leading a sunless and squalid existence from the
cradle to the grave, serfs adscripti to the gaol and the workhouse. And this thought may quicken the
zeal, already so earnest, of statesmen and philanthropists to remove from us
this reproach.
To the eye of
an inexperienced observer there appear to be symptoms in the British
administration of India, especially in the preponderating importance of
land-tax as a source of revenue, and in our manner of employing the native
foederati, which suggest some anxious comparisons with the Roman imperial
system. May it prove that the resemblance is only in appearance, not in
reality!
The
pulverization of the burgher-class by the fiscal oppressions practised upon the Decurions may possibly contain some
warnings for benevolent administrators who, in their very zeal for the
improvement of the condition of the people, may allow local taxation to attain
proportions which, were any pause to occur in the onward march of the country,
might be found well-nigh intolerable.
But of all the
forces which were at work for the destruction of the prosperity of the Roman
world none is more deserving of the careful study of an English statesman than
the grain-largesses to the populace of Rome. Whatever
occasional ebbings there may be in the current, there
can be little doubt that the tide of affairs, in England and in all the
countries of Western Europe, as well as in the United States of America, sets
permanently towards Democracy. Will the great Democracies of the Twentieth
Century resist the temptation to use political power as a means of material
self-enrichment? With a higher ideal of public .duty than has been shown by
some of the governing classes which preceded them, will they refrain from
jobbing the Commonwealth? Warned by the experience of Rome, will they shrink
from reproducing directly, or indirectly, the political heresy of Caius
Gracchus, that he who votes in the Forum must be fed by the State? If they do,
perhaps the world may see Democracies as long-lived as the Dynasties of Egypt
or of China. If they do not, assuredly now as in the days of our Saxon forefathers,
it will be found that he who is giver of bread is also lord. The old weary
round will recommence, democracy leading to anarchy, and anarchy to despotism,
and the National Workshops of some future Gracchus will build the palaces in
which British or American despots, as incapable to rule as Arcadius or
Honorius, will guide mighty empires to ruin, amidst the acclamations of
flatterers as eloquent and as hollow as the courtly Claudian.
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