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VOLUME VII
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PREFACE
IN volumes V and VI Greece was the centre of the
Mediterranean world; but the conquests of Alexander shifted the centre of
gravity eastwards and left room for the emergence of a new great power,
the Republic of Rome. Greece, in fact, was destined to lose her primacy in
the West without gaining complete political or intellectual domination in the
East. But in the early decades of the third century Rome was still
occupied in making good her hold upon the Italian peninsula, and no
observer of the time would have compared her progress with the
brilliant expansion of the Greeks eastwards. Out of the confusion
which followed the death of Alexander emerged the three great Hellenistic
monarchies, Macedon, Egypt and the Seleucid Empire of the East, whose
making and century organization are the main theme of the first part of
this volume. These three predominant powers overshadowed the countries
which bordered on the eastern Mediterranean. The great days of Pergamum
and Rhodes belong to the next period, and the systematic account of their
economy is reserved for volume VIII.
The third was an age of political experiment, and we
witness the birth of the Great State, instinct with Greek and Macedonian
ideas, learning from the ancient bureaucracies of the East, and
transcending the bounds of race. But in Egypt and in Seleucid Syria the
fusion of races was not complete: the military needs of these monarchies
compelled them to accord a special position to Graeco-Macedonian settlers
and to use the forms of the Greek city-state to make homes for the
governing class. This fact doubtless did much to limit the efficacy of the
new settlements as centres of Hellenic culture; and imposing as was the
Seleucid Empire it had to face an Oriental reaction even before the tide
of Greek expansion had reached its full. In Greece proper a marked advance
was made in the federalism of the Aetolian and Achaean Leagues, which
acquired a cohesion and a strength denied to the city-states, whose
failure as political units had been proved by the history of the preceding
century, Yet the polis meant much to the Greeks as the setting of their
social life, and the Hellenistic world was covered With cities, even where
these communities had no power to control their own fortunes.
Side by side with these political experiments we find
in literature and in philosophy new movements, which, if less splendid
than the achievements of the fifth and fourth centuries, were to exercise
a more widespread influence. The age which witnessed the rise of the Stoic and
Epicurean philosophies made Athens not only the school of Greece but also
the school of the Mediterranean world. In Alexandria, for this purpose a
part of Greece rather than a part of Egypt, there arose the first academic
community which, though it had its pedants, yet pursued the Greek way
of wisdom, the way of the seeker rather than of the sage.
Most striking of all the intellectual achievements of this period
were those of the great mathematicians and astronomers. Even at
a time when Greece was beginning to lose the political primacy which
had been hers, the Greeks of the home-land and of the Diaspora remained
the most effective fraction of the human race.
The final achievement of the Hellenistic movement was
the conception of the world, that is the world of ancient civilization, as
in a sense a single community—the oecumene—with the Greek koine as
almost a universal language. But the conception was ‘a leap of the
imagination alone,’ and was not translated into political or economic
fact. The farther East remained in essentials unchanged. There was in externals
a fusion of religions within the borders of the Hellenistic kingdoms, but
Judaism, Zoroastrianism and the local cults of Egypt bided their time, and
the way was being prepared for a religious reaction of the East upon the
West which was to have the most momentous consequences. In the East
there was a species of passive resistance to be followed by reaction; in
the West the unity of the oecumene was broken by the intrusion of
the Celts, who in the fourth century crossed the Alps and in the third
century the Balkans. Their first coming, transient as were its political
effects, yet had its historical significance, and it is not only because
of chronological necessities that the account of the Celts is placed where
it is in this volume but also in order to give a strong contrast to the
Hellenistic order which conceived of the world of men in terms of Hellenistic
thought. And further, even when Celtic raiders had been repelled or
absorbed, the Celts remained to bar the north-western expansion of
the older Mediterranean states and turn them upon themselves.
But these invasions had slight effects compared with the making of a
united state at Rome and the attainment of a Roman hegemony in a united
Italy.
This state so built up was to dominate the remaining
history of the ancient world, to create not a monarchy but an empire, and
to rival Greece in the deep imprint which it made upon the mind of the
modern world.
In this volume we witness only the rise of Rome, but
the political achievements of that rise rank with the creations of the
Hellenistic monarchies and the Greek Leagues in their immediate importance and
in their permanent effect as models for later institutions. The story is
in itself less adventurous, because Rome’s problems were near at hand and
did not call for the subtleties of Hellenistic statecraft. It was the good
fortune of the Republic to keep clear of far-flung entanglements until its
strength was able to break through them where its wisdom failed to solve
them. Thus the influence of Rome on the general course of the
Mediterranean world-history was delayed, and it is this fact as well
as the need to treat continuously of what was so essentially continuous,
that justifies the first appearance of Rome in this rather than in an
earlier volume.
The oecumenical importance of Rome itself, which for
longer than any other city was in reality or in sentiment the capital
of the European world, lends a peculiar interest to the problems
of its first foundation and its early monarchy; and the examination of
these problems is particularly instructive in showing how the sciences of
archaeology and historical research may correct, confirm, supplement or
supplant tradition. The vigorous increase of archaeological research in
Italy will lay students of the beginnings of Rome under ever deeper
obligations.
Of yet greater importance is the study of Roman
institutions, which presents to the historian a peculiarly difficult
problem owing to the character of the ancient evidence. For the
historical tradition of the Romans about the growth of their constitution
was in the main the work of annalists who had little sense of
historical criticism and of jurists who had little sense of historical
development. In the chapters on the growth of the Roman constitution will
be found a critical reconstruction intended to show how far logic and a
highly practical grasp of fact combined to build up the strongest
political structure which the world has yet seen. Side by side with this
we can trace, despite the accretions of fiction which lie heavy on the Roman
tradition, the shrewd tenacity which guided the young Republic both in
diplomacy and in war. It is true that the advance of historical criticism
has stripped the old glamour from the story, and we have no means of
re-capturing a sense of close contact with the Rome of the fifth and
fourth centuries such as that which invests the history of Athens
with its peculiarly dramatic character. The Romans contrived to
make it seem inevitable that they should dominate Italy, and it is
hard to realize how unremitting were the efforts that gained them
their reward. Yet tantae molls erat.
Gradually the advance of Rome’s power brought her into
contact and conflict with the Greeks of Southern Italy; and in the period which forms the main theme of the
volume she measured her strength against Pyrrhus, a soldier of the new Greek
school of war, and against the fleets and armies of Carthage, the
oldest great power of the Western Mediterranean. Rome survived
both these tests of her capacity and brought Sicily within the bounds
of Roman Italy. Two centuries of wars in which the Republic
had claimed as the reward of each war greater resources for the
winning of the next had placed at her disposal a man-power stronger
than that which any ancient state had yet controlled. This power
rested not only on the military superiority of Rome but on ties of common
interest and sentiment throughout Italy which the wise policy of the Roman
federation had known how to evoke. Meanwhile the Greeks of the West had
witnessed the career of Agathocles which both in its successes and its failures
attested the political weaknesses which were to surrender the future to
Rome. In the eastern half of the Mediterranean we see the struggle of
Egypt with Syria and Macedonia and the rise in Greece of the
two leagues, the Aetolian and the Achaean, whose fate it was to
prevent the union of Greece under Macedon, while themselves
achieving a form of union which transcended the limits of the Greek
citystate. Finally, the pirate state of Illyria compelled the Republic to
realize that the Adriatic has two coasts, and the Carthaginian Empire in
Spain gave to Hannibal the means of accepting a conflict with Rome which was to
end in the extension of Roman power along the northern coast of the
Mediterranean to the Pillars of Hercules.
This conflict will be the first topic of volume VIII,
which will proceed to treat of the period in which Rome thrust aside
the Hellenistic monarchies and came to be acknowledged as the
single great power in the Mediterranean world. It will also complete
the picture of Hellenistic civilization and economic life and
describe the rise of literature and the advent of philosophy in Rome
herself, taken prisoner by the Hellenism which she dethroned.
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