The Last Republicans Of Rome

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Title:     The Last Republicans Of Rome
Author: Goldwin Smith [More Titles by Smith]

"Has humanity such forces at its command wherewith to combat vice and baseness, that each school of virtue can afford to repel the aid of the rest, and to maintain that it alone is entitled to the praise of courage, of goodness, and of resignation?" Such is the rebuke administered by M. Renan to the Christians who refuse to recognise the martyrs of Stoicism under the Roman Empire. My eye fell upon the words when I had just laid down Professor Mommsen's harsh judgment of the last defenders of the Republic, and they seemed to me applicable to this case also.

It is needless to say that there has been a curious change of opinion as to the merits of these men who, a century ago, were political saints of the Liberal party, but whom in the present day Liberal writers are emulously striving, with Dante, to thrust down into the nethermost hell. Dante puts Brutus and Cassius in hell not because he knows the real history of their acts, or because he is qualified to judge of the moral and political conditions under which they acted, but simply because he is a Ghibelin, and they slew the head of the Holy Roman Empire; and the present change of opinion arises, in the main, not from the discovery of any new fact, or from the better sifting of those already known, but from the prevalence of new sentiments--Imperialism of different shades, Bonapartist or Positivist, and perhaps also hero-worship, which of course fixes upon Caesar. Positivism and Hero-worship are somewhat incongruous allies, for Hero-worship is evidently the least scientific, while Positivism aims at being the most scientific, of all the theories of history.

We are judging the opponents of Caesar, it seems to me, under the dominion of exaggerated notions of the beneficence of the Empire which Caesar founded, of its value as a political model, of its connection with the life of modern civilization, and of the respect, not to say devotion, due to the memory of its founder. Let us try to cast off for an hour the influence of these modern sentiments, and put the whole group of ancient figures back into its place in ancient history.

The Empire was a necessity at the time when it came--granted. But a necessity of what sort? Was it a necessity created by an upward effort, by an elevation of humanity, or by degradation and decline? In the former case you may pass the same sentence upon those who opposed its coming which is passed upon those who crucified Christ, or who, like Philip II., opposed the Reformation in the spirit of bigoted reaction. But in the latter case they must be charged, not with moral blindness or depravity, but only with the lack of that clearness of sight which leads men and parties at the right moment, or even in anticipation of the right moment, to despair; and such perspicacity, to say the least, is a highly scientific quality, requiring perhaps, to make it respectable and safe, a more exact knowledge of historical sequences than we even now possess. Even now we determine these historical necessities by our knowledge of the result. It was a necessity, given all the conditions-- the treachery of Ephialtes included--that the Persians should force the pass of Thermopylae. But the Three Hundred could not know all the conditions. Even if they had, would they have done right in giving way? They fell, but their spirits fought again at Salamis.

To me it appears that the Empire was a necessity of the second kind; that it was an inevitable concession to incurable evil, not a new development of good. The Roman morality, the morality which had produced and sustained the Republic, was now in a state of final and irremediable decay. That morality was narrow and imperfect, or rather it was rudimentary, a feeble and transient prototype of the sounder and more enduring morality which was soon to be born into the world. It was the morality of devotion to a single community, and in fact consisted mainly of the performance of duty to that community in war. But it was real and energetic after its measure and its own time. It produced a type of character, which, if reproduced now, would be out of date and even odious, but which stands in history dignified and imposing even to the last. Nor was it without elements of permanent value. It contributed largely to the patriotism of the seventeenth century, a patriotism which has now perhaps become obsolete in its turn, and is superseded in our aspirations by an ideal with less of right and self-assertion, with more of duty and of social affection, yet did good service against the Stuarts. The Roman morality, together with dignity of character, produced as usual simplicity of life. It produced a reverence for the majesty of law, the voice of the community. It produced relations between the sexes, and domestic relations generally, far indeed below the ideal, yet decidedly above those which commonly existed in the pagan world. It produced a high degree of self-control and of abstinence from vices which prevailed elsewhere. It produced fruits of intellect, some original, especially in the political sphere, others merely borrowed from Greece, yet evincing on the part of the borrower a power of appreciating the superior excellence of another, and that a conquered nation, the value of which, as breaking through the iron boundary of national self-love, has perhaps not received sufficient notice. What was of most consequence to the world at large and to history, it produced, though probably not so much in the way of obedience to recognised principle as of noble instinct, a signal mitigation of Conquest, which was then the universal habit, but from being extermination and destruction, at best slavery or forcible transplantation, became under the Romans a supremacy, imposed indeed by force, and at the cost of much suffering, yet, in a certain sense civilizing, and not exercised wholly without regard for the good of the subject races. Thus that political unity of the nations round the Mediterranean was brought about, which was the necessary precursor and protector of a union of a better kind. A measure of the same praise is due to Alexander, who was a conqueror of the higher order for a similar reason--namely, that though a Macedonian prince, he was imbued with the ideas and the morality of the Greek republics. But Alexander was a single man, and he could not accomplish what was accomplished in a succession of generations by the corporate energies and virtues of the Roman Senate.

The conditions under which this morality had maintained itself were now gone. It depended on the circumstances of a small community, long engaged in a struggle for existence with powerful and aggressive neighbours, the Latin, the Etruscan, the Samnite, and the Gaul; entering in turn, when its own safety had been secured, on a career of conquest, still in a certain sense defensive, since every neighbour was in those days an enemy; and continuing to task to the utmost the citizen's devotion to the State, the virtues of command and obedience necessary to victory, and the frugality necessary to supply the means of great national efforts; while luxury was kept at bay, though the means of indulging it had begun to flow in, by the check of national danger and the counter-attraction of military glory. But all this was at an end when Carthage and Macedon were overthrown. National danger and the necessity for national effort being removed, self-devotion failed, egotism broke loose, and began to revel in the pillage and oppression of a conquered world. The Roman character was corrupted, as the Spartan character was corrupted when Sparta, from being a camp in the midst of hostile Helots, became a dominant power and sent out governors to subject states; though the corruption in the case of Sparta was far more rapid, because Spartan excellence was more exclusively military, more formal and more obsolete. The mass of the Romans ceased to perform military duty, and there being no great public duty except military duty to be performed, there remained no school of public virtue. Such public virtue as there was lingered, though in a degraded form round the eagles of the standing armies, to which the duties of the citizen-soldier were now consigned; and the soldiery thus acquired not only the power but the right of electing the emperors, the best of whom, in fact, after Augustus, were generally soldiers. The ruling nation became a city rabble, the vices of which were but little tempered by the fitful intervention of the enfranchised communities of Italy. Of this rabble, political adventurers bought the consulships, which led to the government of provinces, and wrung out of the unhappy provincials the purchase money and a fortune for themselves besides. These fortunes begot colossal luxury and a general reign of vice. Violence mingling with corruption in the elections was breeding a complete anarchy in Rome. Roman religion, to which, if we believe Polybius, we must ascribe a real influence in the maintenance of morality, was at the same time undermined by the sceptical philosophy of Greece, and by contact with conflicting religions, the spectacle of which had its effect in producing the scepticism of Montaigne.

The empire itself was on the point of dissolution. In empires founded by single conquerors, such as those of the East, when corruption has made the reigning family its prey, the satraps make themselves independent. The empire of Alexander was divided among his generals. The empire of the conquering republic of Rome, the republic itself having succumbed to vices analagous to the corruption of a reigning family, was about to be broken up by the great military chiefs. Pompey had already, in fact, carved out for himself a separate kingdom in Spain, which with its legions he had got permanently into his own hands. Thus the unity of the civilized portion of humanity, so indispensable to the future of the race, would have been lost. Nor was there any remedy but one. Representation of the provinces was out of the question. Supposing it possible that a single assembly could have been formed out of all these different races and tongues, the representation of the conquered would have been the abdication of the conqueror, and abdication was a step for which the lazzaroni of the so-called democratic party were as little prepared as the haughtiest aristocrat in Rome. A world of egotism, without faith or morality, could be held together only by force, which presented itself in the person of the ablest, most daring, and most unscrupulous adventurer of the time. If faith should again fail, and the world again be reduced to a mass of egotism, the same sort of government will again, be needed. In fact, we are at this moment rather in danger of something of the kind, and these revivals of Caesarism are not wholly out of season. But in any other case to propose to society such a model would be treason to humanity.

The abandonment of military duty by the Roman people had, among other things, made slavery more immoral than ever, because there was no longer any semblance of a division of labour: the master could no longer be said to defend the slave in war while the slave supported him by labour at home. Becoming more immoral, slavery became more cruel. The six thousand crosses erected on the road from Capua to Rome after the Servile War were the terrible proof.

As to the existence of an oligarchy in the bosom of the dominant republic, this would in itself have been no great evil to the subject world, to which it mattered little whether its tyrants were a hundred or a hundred thousand; just as to the unenfranchised in modern communities it matters little whether the enfranchised class be large or small. In fact, the broader the basis of a tyranny, the more fearless and unscrupulous, generally speaking, the tyranny is.

We need not overstate the case. If we do we shall tarnish the laurels of Caesar, who would have shown no genius in killing the republic had the republic been already dead. There was still respect for the law and the constitution. Pompey's hesitation when supreme power was within his grasp, Caesar's own pause at the Rubicon, are proofs of it. The civil wars of Marius and Sulla had fearfully impaired, in the eyes of Romans, but they had not utterly destroyed, the majesty of Rome. There were still great characters--characters which you may dislike, but of which you can never rationally speak with contempt--and there must have been some general element of worth in which these characters were formed. If the recent administration of the Senate had not been glorious, still, from a Roman point of view, it had not been disastrous: the revolt of the slaves and the insurrection in Spain had been quelled; Mithridates had been conquered; the pirates, though for a time their domination accused the feebleness of the government, had at length been put down. The only great military calamity of recent date was the defeat of Crassus, whose unprovoked and insane invasion of Parthia was the error, not of the Senate, but of the Triumvirate. Legions were forthcoming for the conquest of Gaul, and a large reserve of treasure was found in the sacred treasure-house when it was broken open by Caesar. Bad governors of provinces, Verres, Fonteius, Gabinius, were impeached and punished. Lucullus, autocrat and voluptuary as he was, governed his province well. So did Cicero, if we may take his own word for it. We may, at all events, take his own word for this, that he was anxious to be thought to have ruled with purity and justice, which proves that purity and justice were not quite out of fashion. The old Roman spirit still struggled against luxury, and we find Cicero suffering from indigestion, caused by a supper of vegetables at the house of a wealthy friend, whose excellent cook had developed all the resources of gastronomic art in struggling with the restrictions imposed by a sumptuary law. There was intellectual life, and all the civilized tastes and half-moral qualities which the existence of intellectual life implies. In spite of the sanguinary anarchy which often broke out in the Roman streets, Cicero, the most cultivated and the least combative of men, when in exile or in his province, sighs for the capital as a Frenchman sighs for Paris. In short, if we consider the case fairly, we shall admit, I believe, that, besides the force of memory and of old allegiance, there was enough of worth and of apparent hope left, not only to excuse republican illusions, but probably to make it a duty to try the issue with fate. I say probably, and, after all, how can we presume to speak with certainty of a situation so distant from us in time, and so imperfectly recorded?

The great need of the world was public virtue--the spirit of self- sacrifice for the common good. This the empire could not possibly call into being. The public virtue of the ancient world resided in the nationalities which the conquering republic had broken up, and of which the empire only sealed the doom. The empire could never call forth even the lowest form of public virtue, loyalty to the hereditary right of a royal family, because the empire never presented itself as a right, but merely as a personal power. The idea of legitimacy, I apprehend never connected itself with these dynasts who were, in fact, a series of usurpers, veiling their usurpation under republican forms. When the spirit which leads man to sacrifice himself to the good of the community appeared again it appeared in associations and notably in one great association formed not by the empire but independently of it in antagonism to its immorality, and in spite of its persecutions. Accidentally the empire assisted the extension of the great Christian association by completing the overthrow of the national religions, but the main part of this work had been done by the republic and it was the merit neither of the republic nor of the empire.

It is said with confidence that the empire vastly improved the government of the provinces, and that on this account it was a great blessing to the world. I do not believe that any nation had then attained, I do not believe that any nation has now attained, and I doubt whether any nation ever will attain, such a point of morality as to be able to govern other nations for the benefit of the governed. I will say nothing about our Christian policy in India, but let those who rate French morality so highly, consider what French tutelage is to the people of Algeria. But supposing the task undertaken, the question which is the best organ of imperial government--an assembly or an autocrat--is a curious one. I am disposed to think that, taking the average of assemblies and the average of autocrats, there is more hope in the assembly, because in the assembly opinion must have some force. The autocrat is in a certain sense, raised above the dominant nation and its interests, but, after all, he is one of that nation, he lives in it, and subsists by its support. Even in the time of Augustus, if we may trust Dion Cassius Licinius the Governor of Gaul, was guilty of corruptions and peculations curiously resembling those of Verres, from whom he seems to have borrowed the device of tampering with the calendar for the purpose of fiscal fraud, and when the provinces complained, the Emperor hushed up the matter, partly to avoid scandal, partly because Licinius was cunning enough to pretend that his peculations had been intended to cut the sinews of revolt, and that his spoils were reserved for the imperial exchequer. The rebellions of Vindex and Civilis seem to prove that even Caesar's favourite province was not happy. Spain was misgoverned by the deputies both of Julius and Augustus. In Britain, the history of the revolt of the Iceni shews that neither the extortions of Roman usurers, nor the brutalities of Roman officers, had ended with the republic. The blood tax of the conscription appears also to have been cruelly exacted. The tribute of largesses and shows which the empire, though supposed to be lifted high above all partialities, paid to the Roman populace, was drawn almost entirely from the provinces. Emperors who coined money with the tongue of the informer and the sword of the executioner, were not likely to abstain from selling governorships; and, in fact, Seneca intimates that under bad emperors governorships were sold. Of course, the tyranny was felt most at Rome, where it was present; but when Caligula or Caracalla made a tour in the provinces, it was like the march of the pestilence. The absence of a regular bureaucracy, practically controlling, as the Russian bureaucracy does, the personal will of the Emperor, must have made government better under Trajan, but much worse under Nero. The aggregation of land in the hands of a few great land-holders evidently continued, and under this system the garden of Italy became a desert. The decisive fact, however, is that the provinces decayed, and that when the barbarians arrived, all power of resistance was gone. That the empire was consciously levelling and cosmopolitan, surely cannot be maintained. Actium was a Roman victory over the gods of the nations. Augustus, who must have known something about the system, avowedly aimed at restoring the number, the purity, the privileged exclusiveness of the dominant race. His legislation was an attempt to regenerate old Rome; and the political odes of the court poet are full of that purpose. That the empire degraded all that had once been noble in Rome is true; but the degradation of what had once been noble in Rome was not the regeneration of humanity. The vast slave population was no more elevated by the ascendency of the freedmen of the imperial household than the female sex was elevated by the ascendancy of Messalina.

That intellect declined under the emperors, and that the great writers of its earlier period, Tacitus included, were really legacies of the Republic, cannot be denied; and surely it is a pregnant fact. The empire is credited with Roman law. But the Roman law was ripe for codification in the time of the first Caesar. The leading principles of the civil law seem by that time to have been in existence. Unquestionably the great step had been taken of separating law as a science from consecrated custom, and of calling into existence regular law courts and what was tantamount to a legal profession. The mere evolution of the system from its principles required no transcendant effort; and the idea of codification must have been something less than divine, or it could not have been compassed by the intellect of Justinian. The criminal law of the empire, with its arbitrary courts, its secret procedure, its elastic law of treason, and its practice of torture, was the scourge of Europe till it was encountered and overthrown by the jury system, a characteristic offspring of the Teutonic mind.

Tolerant the empire was, at least if you did not object to having the statue of Caligula set up in your Holy of Holies, and this toleration fostered the growth of a new religion. But it is needless to say that, in this respect, the politicians of the empire only inherited the negative virtue of those of the republic.

As to private morality, we may surely trust the common authorities-- Juvenal, Suetonius, Petronius Arbiter--supported as they are by the evidence of the museums. There was one family, at least, whose colossal vices and crimes afforded a picture in the deepest sense tragic, considering their tremendous effect on the lot and destinies of humanity.

It is a glorious dream, this of an autocrat, the elect of humanity, raised above all factions and petty interests, armed with absolute power to govern well, agreeing exactly with all our ideas, giving effect to all our schemes of beneficence, and dealing summarily with our opponents; but it does not come through the "horngate" of history, at least not of the history of the Roman empire.

The one great service which the empire performed to humanity was this: it held together, as nothing else could have held together, the nations of the civilized world, and thus rendered possible a higher unity of mankind.

I ventured to note, as one of the sources of illusion, a somewhat exaggerated estimate of the amount and value of the Roman element transfused by the empire into modern civilization. The theory of continuity, suggested by the discoveries of physical science, is prevailing also in history. A historical theory is to me scientific, not because it is suggested by physical science, but because it fits the historical facts. It may be true that there are no cataclysms in history, but still there are great epochs. In fact, there are great epochs, even in the natural history of the world; there were periods at which organization and life began to exist. There may have been a time at which a still further effort was made, and spiritual life also was brought into being. Things which do not come suddenly or abruptly, may nevertheless be new. A great sensation has been created by an article in the _Quarterly_, on "The Talmud," which purports to shew that the teachings of Christianity were, in fact, only those of Pharisaism. The organ of orthodoxy, in publishing that article, was rather like our great mother Eve in Milton, who "knew not eating death." But after all, Pharisaism crucified Christianity, and probably it was not for plagiarism. Supposing we adopt the infiltration theory of the Barbarian conquests, and discard that of a sudden deluge of invasion, it remains certain, unless all contemporary writers were much mistaken, that some very momentous change did, after all, occur. Catholicism and Feudalism were the life of the Middle Ages. Catholicism, though it had grown up under the Empire, and at last subjugated it, was not of it. As to Feudalism, it is possible, no doubt, to find lands held on condition of military service under the Roman empire as well as under the Ottoman empire, and in other military states. But is it possible to find anything like the social hierarchy of Feudalism, its code of mutual rights and duties, or the political and social characters which it formed?

In France and Spain, much of the Roman province survived, but in England, not the least influential of the group of modern nations, it was, as we have every reason to believe, completely erased by the Saxon invaders, who came fresh from the seats of their barbarism, hating cities and city life, and ignorant of the majesty of Rome. If a Roman element afterwards found its way into England with the Norman conquest, it was rather ecclesiastical than imperial, and those who brought it were Scandinavians to the core. Alfred had been at Rome in his boyhood, it is true, and may have brought away some ideas of central dominion; but his laws open with a long quotation, not from the Pandects, but from the New Testament--his character is altogether that of a Christian, not of a Roman ruler, and if he had any political model before him, it was, probably, at least as much the Hebrew monarchy as the military despotism of the Caesars. Many of the Roman cities remained, and with them their municipal governments, and hence it is assumed that municipal government altogether is Roman. But there was a municipal government in the Saxon capital, and evidently there must be wherever large cities exist with any degree of independence. The Roman law was, at all events so far lost in the early part of the Middle Ages when Christendom was in process of formation that the study of it afterwards seemed new. Roman literature influenced that of mediaeval Christendom down to about the end of the twelfth century. Our writers of the time of Henry II. compose in half classical Latin and affect classical elegancies of style. But then comes a philosophy which in spite of its worship of Aristotle is essentially an original creation of the mediaeval and Catholic mind couched in a language Latin indeed but almost as remote from classical Latin as German itself: the tongue in truth of a new intellectual world. Open Aquinas and ask yourself how much is left of the language or the mind of Rome. The eye of the antiquary sees the Basilica in the Cathedral, but what essential resemblance does the Roman place of judicature and business bear to that marvellous and fantastic poetry of religion writing its hymns in stone? In the same manner the Roman _castra_ are traceable in the form as well as the designation of the mediaeval _castella_. But what resemblance did the feudal militia bear to the legionaries? And what became of the Roman art of war till it was revived by Gustavus Adolphus? The outward mould of Christendom the Roman empire was and that it was so gives it great dignity and interest, but it was no more. The life came from the German forest the life of life from the peasantry of Galilee the least Romanized perhaps of the populations beneath the sway of Rome.

The founder of the Roman empire was a very great man. With such genius and such fortune it is not surprising that he should be made an idol. In intellectual stature he was at least an inch higher than his fellows which is in itself enough to confound all our notions of right and wrong. He had the advantage of being a statesman before he was a soldier whereas Napoleon was a soldier before he was a statesman. His ambition coincided with the necessity of the world which required to be held together by force, and therefore his empire endured for four hundred, or if we include its eastern offset, for fourteen hundred years, while that of Napoleon crumbled to pieces in four. But unscrupulous ambition was the root of his character. It was necessary in fact to enable him to trample down the respect for legality which still hampered other men. To connect him with any principle seems to me impossible. He came forward, it is true, as the leader of what is styled the democratic party, and in that sense the empire which he founded may be called democratic. But to the gamblers who brought their fortunes to that vast hazard table, the democratic and aristocratic parties were merely _rouge_ and _noir_. The social and political equity, the reign of which we desire to see was, in truth, unknown to the men of Caesar's time. It is impossible to believe that there was an essential difference of principle between one member of the triumvirate and another. The great adventurer had begun by getting deeply into debt, and had thus in fact bound himself to overthrow the republic. He fomented anarchy to prepare the way for his dictatorship. He shrank from no accomplice however tainted, not even from Catiline; from no act however profligate or even inhuman. Abusing his authority as a magistrate, for party purposes, he tries to put to a cruel and ignominious death Rabirius, an aged and helpless man, for an act done in party warfare thirty years before. The case of Vettius is less clear, but Dr. Mommsen, at all events, seems to have little doubt that Caesar was privy to the subornation of this perjurer, and when his perjuries had broken down, to his assassination. Dr. Mommsen owns that there was a dark period in the life of the great man; in that darkness it could scarcely be expected that the Republicans should see light.

The noblest feature in Caesar's character was his clemency. But we are reminded that it was ancient, not modern clemency, when we find numbered among the signal instances of it his having cut the throats of the pirates before he hanged them, and his having put to death without torture (_simplici morte punivit_) a slave suspected of conspiring against his life. Some have gone so far as to speak of him as the incarnation of humanity. But where in the whole history of Roman conquest will you find a more ruthless conqueror? A million of Gauls, we are told, perished by the sword. Multitudes were sold into slavery. The extermination of the Eburones went to the verge even of ancient license. The gallant Vercingetorix, who had fallen into Caesar's hands under circumstances which would have touched any but a depraved heart, was kept by him a captive for six years, and butchered in cold blood on the day of the triumph. The sentiment of humanity was at that time undeveloped. Be it so, but then we must not call Caesar the incarnation of humanity.

Vast plans are ascribed to Caesar at the time of his death, and it seems to be thought that a world of hopes for humanity perished when he fell. But if he had lived and acted for another century what could he have done with those moral and political materials but found what he did found--a military and sensualist empire? A multitude of projects are attributed to him by writers who we must remember are late and who make him ride a fairy charger with feet like the hands of a man. Some of these projects are really great, such as the codification of the law and measures for the encouragement of intellect and science; others are questionable, such as the restoration of commercial cities from which commerce had retired; others, great works to be accomplished by an unlimited command of men and money, are the common dreams of every Nebuchadnezzar. What we know if we know anything of his intentions is that he was about to set out on a campaign against the Parthians in whose plains this prototype of Napoleon might perhaps have found a torrid Moscow. No great advance of humanity can take place without a great moral effort excited by higher moral desires. The masters of the legions can only set in action by their fiat material forces. Even these they often misdirect; but if the empire could have given every man Nero's golden house the inhabitants might still have been as unhappy as Nero.

It is not doubtful that Caesar was a type of the sensuality of his age. His worshippers even feel it necessary to gird at characters deficient in sensual passion with a friskiness which is a little amusing when you connect it with the spectacles and the blameless life of a learned professor. So gifted a nature will absorb a good deal of mere sensual vice, it is true, but a sensualist could hardly be a pure and noble organ of humanity. In this I have the Positivists with me. Even in Caesar's lifetime the world had a taste of the vicissitudes of empire while he was revelling in the palace of Cleopatra and leaving affairs to Antony and Dolabella. Perhaps the satiety of the voluptuary had something to do with the recklessness with which at the last he neglected to guard his life. He was the greatest patron of gladiatorial shows and signalized his accession to power by magnificent scenes of carnage in the arena--a strange dawn for the day of a new civilization. Must we not a little doubt the consistency of his policy and even his insight when we find him after all this enacting sumptuary laws?

Still Caesar was a very great man and he played a dazzling part, as all men do who come just at the fall of an old system, when society is as clay in the hands of the potter, and found a new system in its place, while the less dazzling task of making the new system work, by probity and industry, and of restoring the shattered allegiance of a people to its institutions, descends upon unlaurelled heads. But that the men of his time were bound to recognise in him a Messiah, to use the phrase of the Emperor of the French, and that those who opposed him were Jews crucifying their Saviour, is an impression which I venture to think will in time subside. No golden scales were hung out in heaven to shew the republicans that the balance of Divine will had turned, and that their duty was submission. "Momentumque fuit mutatus Curio rerum--" The only sign vouchsafed to them was the conversion of an unprincipled debauchee.

They have, therefore, a fair claim to be judged each upon the merits of his case, and not in the lump as enemies of the human race; and to judge them fairly is a good exercise in historical morality. The three principal names in the party are those of Cato, Cicero, and Marcus Brutus. Pompey, though the nominal chief of the republicans, may rather, as Dr Mommsen truly says, be called the first military monarch of Rome. There is a vigorous portrait of him, from the republican point of view, by Lucan, who, though detestable as an epic poet, sometimes in his political passages, and especially in his characters, shews himself the countryman of Tacitus. Pompey is there described with truth as combining the desire of supreme power with a lingering respect for the constitution. The great aristocrat is painted as simple in his habits of life, and his household as uncorrupted by the fortunes of its lord--the last relics of the control imposed by the spirit of the republic on private luxury, which was soon to be released by the Empire from all restraint and carried to the most revolting height.

Marcus Cato was the one man whom, living and dead, Caesar evidently dreaded. The Dictator even assailed his memory in a brace of pamphlets entitled Anti-Cato, of the quality of which we have one or two specimens, in Plutarch, from which we should infer that they were scurrilous and slanderous to the last degree; a proof that even Caesar could feel fear, and that in Caesar, too, fear was mean. Dr Mommsen throws himself heartily into Caesar's antipathy, and can scarcely speak of Cato without something like loss of temper. The least uncivil thing which he says of him, is that he was a Don Quixote, with Favonius for his Sancho. The phrase is not a happy one, since Sancho is not the caricature but the counterfoil of Don Quixote; Don Quixote being spirit without sense and Sancho sense without spirit. Imperialism, if it could see itself, is in fact a world of Sanchos and it would not be the less so if every Sancho of the number were master of the whole of physical science, and used it to cook his food. Of the two court poets of Caesar's successor, one makes Cato preside over the spirits of the good in the Elysian fields, while the other speaks with respect, at all events, of the soul which remained unconquered in a conquered world--"Et cuneta terrarum subacta praeter atrocem animum Catonis." Paterculus, an officer of Tiberius and a thorough Caesarian, calls Cato a man of ideal virtue ("homo virtuti simillimus") who did right not for appearance sake, but because it was not in his nature to do wrong. When the victor is thus overawed by the shade of the vanquished, the vanquished can hardly have been a "fool." Contemporaries may be mistaken as to the merits of a character, but they cannot well be mistaken as to the space which it occupied in their own eyes. Sallust, the partizan of Marius and Caesar, who had so much reason to hate the senatorial party, speaks of Caesar and Cato as the two mighty opposites of his time, and in an elaborate parallel ascribes to Caesar the qualities which secure the success of the adventurer; to Cato those which make up the character of the patriot. It is a mistake to regard Cato the younger as merely an unseasonable repetition of Cato the elder. His inspiration came not from a Roman, but from a Greek school, which, with all its errors and absurdities, and in spite of the hypocrisy of many of its professors, really aimed highest in the formation of character; and the practical teachings and aspirations of which, embodied in the Reflections of Marcus Aurelius, it is impossible to study without profound respect for the force of moral conception and the depth of moral insight which they sometimes display. Cato went to Greece to sit at the feet of a Greek teacher in a spirit very different from the national pride of his ancestor. It is this which makes his character interesting: it was an attempt at all events to grasp and hold fast a high rule of life in an age when the whole moral world was sinking in a vortex of scoundrelism, and faith in morality, public or private, had been lost. Of course the character is formal, and in some respects even grotesque. But you may trace formalism, if you look closely enough, in every life led by a rule; in everything in fact between the purest spiritual impulse on one side and abandoned sensuality on the other.

Attempts to revive old Roman simplicity of dress and habits in the age of Lucullus, were no doubt futile enough: yet this is only the symbolical garb of the Hebrew prophet. The scene is in ancient Rome, not in the smoking-room of the House of Commons. The character as painted by Plutarch, who seems to have drawn from the writings of contemporaries, is hard of course, but not cynical. Cato was devoted to his brother Caepio, and when Caepio died, forgot all his Stoicism in the passionate indulgence of his grief, and all his frugality in lavishing gold and perfumes on the funeral. Caesar in "Anti-Cato" accused him of sifting the ashes for the gold, which, says Plutarch, is like charging Hercules with cowardice. Where the sensual appetites are repressed, whatever may be the theory of life, the affections are pretty sure to be strong, unless they are nipped by some such process as is undergone by a monk. Cato's resignation of his fruitful wife to a childless friend, revolting as it is to our sense, betokens not so much brutality in him as coarseness of the conjugal relations at Rome. Evidently the man had the power of touching the hearts of others. His soldiers, though he has given them no largesses, and indulged them in no license, when he leaves them, strew their garments under his feet. His friends at Utica linger at the peril of their lives to give him a sumptuous funeral. He affected conviviality like Socrates. He seems to have been able to enjoy a joke too at his own expense. He can laugh when Cicero ridicules his Stoicism in a speech; and when in a province he meets the inhabitants of a town turning out, and thinks at first that it is in his own honour, but soon finds that it is in honour of a much greater man, the confidential servant of Pompey, at first his dignity is outraged, but his anger soon gives place to amusement. That his public character was perfectly pure, no one seems to have doubted; and there is a kindliness in his dealings with the dependants of Rome which shews that had he been an emperor he would have been such an emperor as Trajan--a man whom he probably resembled, both in the goodness of his intentions and in the limited powers of his mind. Impracticable, of course, in a certain sense he was; but his part was that of a reformer, and to compromise with the corruption against which he was contending would have been to lose the only means of influence, which, having no military force and no party, he possessed--the unquestioned integrity of his character. He is said by Dr. Mommsen to have been incapable of even conceiving a policy. By policy I suppose is meant one of those brilliant schemes of ambition with which some literary men are fond of identifying themselves, fancying, it seems, that thereby they themselves after their measure play the Caesar. The policy which Cato conceived was simply that of purifying and preserving the Republic. So far, at all events, he had an insight into the situation, that he knew the real malady of the State to be want of public spirit, which he did his best to supply. And the fact is, that he did more than once succeed in a remarkable way in stemming the tide of corruption. Though every instinct bade him struggle to the last, he had sense enough to see the state of the case, and to advise that, to avert anarchy, supreme power should be put into the hands of Pompey, whose political superstition, if not his loyalty, there was good reason to trust. When at last civil war broke out, Cato went into it like Falkland, crying "peace;" he set his face steadily against the excesses and cruelties of his party; and when he saw the field of Dyrrhaeium covered with his slain enemies, he covered his face and wept. He wept a Roman over Romans, but humanity will not refuse the tribute of his tears. After Pharsalus he cherished no illusion, as Dr Mommsen himself admits, and though he determined himself to fall fighting, he urged no one else to resistance: he felt that the duty of an ordinary citizen was done. His terrible march over the African desert shewed high powers of command, as we shall see by comparing it with the desert march of Napoleon. Dr. Mommsen ridicules his pedantry in refusing, on grounds of loyalty, to take the commandership-in-chief over the head of a superior in rank. Cato was fighting for legality, and the spirit of legality was the soul of his cause. But besides this, he was himself without experience of war; and by declining the nominal command he retained the real control. He remained master to the last of the burning vessel. Our morality will not approve of his voluntary death; but then our morality would give him a sufficient motive for living, even if he was to be bound to the car of the conqueror. Looking to Roman opinion, he probably did what honour dictated; and those who prefer honour to life are not so numerous that we can afford to speak of them with scorn. "The fool," says Dr Mommsen, when the drama of the republic closes with Cato's death--"The fool spoke the Epilogue" Whether Cato was a fool or not, it was not he that spoke the Epilogue. The Epilogue was spoken by Marcus Aurelius, whose principles, political as well as philosophical, were identical with those for which Cato gave his life. All that time the Stoic and Republican party lived, sustained by the memory of its martyrs, and above them all by that of Cato. At first it struggled against the Empire; at last it accepted it, and when the world was weary of Caesars, assumed the government and gave humanity the respite of the Antonines. The doctrine of continuity is valid for all parties alike, and the current of public virtue was not cut off by Pharsalus. On the whole, remote as the character of Cato is in some respects from our sympathies, absurd as it would be if taken as a model for our imitation, I recognise it as a proof of the reality and indestructibility of moral force, even when pitted against the masters of thirty legions.

Against Cicero, again, Dr. Mommsen is so bitter, he is so determined to suppress as well as to degrade him, that it would be difficult even to make out from his pages who and what the once divine Tully was. Much of Dr. Mommsen's dashing criticism on Cicero's writings appears just, though we might trust the critic more if we did not find him in the next page evading the unwelcome duty of criticising Caesar's "Bellum Civile," under cover of some sentimental remarks about the difference between hope and fulfilment in a great soul. Cicero was no philosopher, in the highest sense of the term; yet it is not certain that he did not do some service to humanity by promulgating, in eloquent language, a pretty high and liberal morality, which both modified monkish ethics, and, when monkish ethics fell, and brought down Christian ethics in their fall, did something to supply the void. The Orations, even the great Philippic, I must confess I could never enjoy. But all orations, read long after their delivery, are like spent missiles, wingless and cold: they retain the deformities of passion, without the fire. A speech embodying great principles may live with the principles which it embodies; otherwise happy are the orators whose speeches are lost. The Letters it is not so easy to give up, especially when we consider of how many graceful and pleasant compositions of the same kind, of how many self-revelations, which have brought the hearts of men nearer to each other, those letters have been the model. That, however, which pleases most in Cicero is that he is, for his age, a thoroughly and pre- eminently civilized man. He hates gladiatorial shows; he despises even the tasteless pageantry of the Roman theatre; he heartily loves books; he is saving up all his earnings to buy a coveted library for his old age; he has a real enthusiasm for great writers; he breaks through national pride, and feels sincerely grateful to the Greeks as the authors; of civilization, rogues though he knew them to be in his time; he mourns, albeit with an apology, over the death of a slave; his slaves evidently are attached to him, and are faithful to him at the last; he writes to his favourite freedman with all the warmth of equal friendship. In his writings--in the "De Legibus," for instance--you will find principles of humanity far more comprehensive than those by which the policy of the empire was moulded. His tastes were pure and refined, and though he multiplied his villas, and decorated them with cost and elegance, it is certain that he was perfectly free alike from the prodigal ostentation and from the debauchery of the time indeed his vast intellectual industry implies a temperate life. For the game- preserving tendencies of the great oligarchs, he had a hearty dislike and contempt; in spite of the ill-looking, though obscure, episode of his divorce from his wife Terentia, he was evidently a man of strong family affections, the natural adjuncts of moral purity; he is inconsolable for the death of his daughter, spends days in melancholy wandering in the woods, and finds consolation only in erecting a temple to the beloved shade. His faults of character, both in private and public, are glaring, and the only thing to be said in excuse of his vanity is that it is so frank, and says plainly, "Puff me," not "Puff me not." As a political adventurer of the higher class, pushing his way under an aristocratic government by his talents and his training, received in course of time into the ranks of the aristocracy, yet never one of them, he will bear comparison with Burke. He resembles Burke, too, in his religious constitutionalism and reverence for the wisdom of political ancestors and perhaps his hope of creating a party at once conservative and reforming, by a combination of the moneyed interest with the aristocracy, was not much more chimerical than Burke's hope of creating a party at once conservative and reforming out of the materials of Whiggism. Each of the two men affected a balanced, and in the literal sense, a trimming policy, as opposed to one of abstract principle, Burke, perhaps, from temperament, Cicero from necessity. Impeachments at Rome in Cicero's time were no doubt the regular stepping-stones of rising politicians; nevertheless, the accuser of Verres may fairly be credited with some, at least, of the genuine sentiment which impelled the accuser of Warren Hastings. We must couple with the Verrines the admirable letter of the orator to his brother Quintus on the government of a province, and his own provincial administration, which, as was said before, appears to have been excellent. Cicero rose, not as an adherent of the aristocracy, but as their opponent, and the assailant, a bold assailant, of the tyranny of Sulla. He was brought to the front in politics, as Sallust avers, by his merit, in spite of his birth and social position, when the mortal peril of the Catilinarian conspiracy was gathering round the state, and necessity called for the man, and not the game-preserver. His conduct in that hour of supreme peril is ridiculously overpraised by himself. Not only so, but he begs a friend in plain terms to write a history of it and to exaggerate. Now, it is denounced as brutal tyranny and judicial murder. But those who hold this language have new lights on the subject of Catiline. I confess that on me these new lights have not dawned; I still believe Catiline to have been a terrible anarchist, coming forth from the abyss of debauchery, ruin, and despair, which lay beneath: the great fortunes of Rome. The land of Caesar Borgia has produced such men in more than one period of history. The alleged illegality of the execution was made the stalking- horse of a party move, and scrupulous legality found a champion and an avenger in Clodius. On his return from exile, Cicero was received with the greatest enthusiasm by the whole population of Italy, a fact which Dr. Mommsen is inclined to explain away, but which we should, perhaps, accept as the key to some other facts in Cicero's history. The Italians were probably the most respectable of the political elements, and it seems they not only looked up to their fellow-provincial with pride, but saw in him a statesman who was saving their homesteads from a reign of terror. That Cicero had the general support of the Italians was quite enough to make his adherence an object of serious consideration to Caesar, though Dr. Mommsen persists in interpolating into the relations of the two men the contempt which he feels, and which he fancies Caesar must have felt, for an advocate. Surely, however, it is a mistake to think that oratory was not even in those days a real power at Rome. Can a greater platitude be conceived than railing at a statesman of antiquity for having been a rhetorician? Was not Pericles a rhetorician? Was not Caesar himself a rhetorician? Did he not learn rhetoric from the same master as Cicero? Some day we may be ruled by political science; but rhetoric was, at all events, an improvement on mere force. The situation at Rome had now become essentially military; and Cicero having no military force at his command could not really control the situation.

His attempts to control it exposed him to all the miscarriages and all the indignities which such an attempt is sure to entail. He was a vessel of earthenware, or rather of very fragile porcelain, swimming among vessels of brass. Self-respect would perhaps have prescribed retirement from public life; but, to say nothing of his egotism, he had done too much to retire. Egotistical he was in the highest degree, and that failing made all his humiliations doubly ignominious; but still, I think, if you judge him candidly, you wilt see that he really loved his country, and that his greatest object of desire was, as he himself says, to live in the grateful memory of after-times; not the highest of all aims, but higher than that of the political adventurer. When the civil war came, his perplexity was painful, and he betrayed it with his usual want of reticence. In that, as in other respects, his character is the direct opposite of that of the "gloomy sporting man," whose ways Louis Napoleon, it is said, avowed that he had studied during his exile in England, and followed with profit as a conspirator in France. Cicero and Cato knew too well that Pompey had "licked the sword of Sulla;" but they knew also, by long experience of his political character, that he shrank from doing the last violence to the constitution. On the other hand, all men expected that Caesar, who had formerly given himself out as the political heir of Marius, who had restored the trophies of Marius, and had undertaken the conquest of Gaul, evidently as a continuation of the victories of Marius, descending upon Italy with an army partly consisting of barbarians and trained in the most ferocious warfare, would renew the Marian reign of terror. This fear put all Italy at first on Pompey's side. Caesar had not yet revealed his nobler and more glorious self. Even Curio told Cicero, in an interview, the object of which was to draw Cicero to the Caesarian side, that Caesar's clemency was merely policy, not in his nature. The best security against the bloody excesses of a victorious party at that moment, undoubtedly, was the presence of Marcus Cato in the camp of Pompey. After Pharsalus, Cicero submitted like many men of sterner mould. This departure of the advocate from the Pompeian camp is surrounded by Dr. Mommsen with circumstances of ridicule, for which, on reference to what I suppose to be the authorities, I can find no historical foundation. The fiercer Pompeians very nearly killed him for refusing to stay and command them; his life was in fact only saved by the intrepid moderation of Cato; and this is surely not a proof that they deemed his presence worthless. Once more, orators were not ridiculous in the eyes of antiquity. Cicero accepted, and, in a certain sense, served under the dictatorate of Caesar; though he afterwards rejoiced when it was overthrown, and the constitution, the idol of his political worship, was restored; just as we may suppose a French constitutionalist, not of stern mould, yet not dishonest, accepting and serving under the empire, yet rejoicing at the restoration of constitutional government. In the interval, between the death of Caesar and Philippi, he was really the soul and the main support of the Restoration. I have said what I think of the Philippics; but there can be no doubt that they told, or that Brutus and Cassius thought them, worth at least a legion.

Cicero met death with a physical courage, which there is no reason to believe that he wanted in life. His cowardice was political; his fears were for his position and reputation. If Cato survived in the tradition of public virtue, so did Cicero in the tradition of culture, which saved the empire of the Caesars from being an empire of Moguls. The culture of a republic saved Caesar himself from being a mere Timur, and set him after his victory to reforming calendars and endowing science, instead of making pyramids of heads. Is it absurd to suppose that the great soldier, who was also a great man of letters, had more respect for intellect without military force than his literary admirers, and that he really wished to adorn his monarchy by allying to it the leading man of intellect of the time?

Our accounts of Marcus Brutus are not very clear. Appian confounds Marcus with Decimus; and it appears not unlikely that "Et tu Brute," if it was said at all, was said to Decimus, who was a special favourite of Caesar, and was named in his will. Marcus seems to have been a man of worth after his fashion; a patriot of the narrow Roman type, reproduced in later days by Fletcher of Saltoun, whose ideal republic was an oligarchy, and who did not shrink from proposing to settle the proletariat difficulty by making the common people slaves. This is quite compatible with the fact revealed to us in the letters of Cicero, that Brutus was implicated, through his agents, in the infamous practice of lending money to provincials at exorbitant interest, and abusing the power of the Imperial Governments to exact the debt. One can imagine a West Indian slave-owner, dealing with negroes through his agent according to the established custom, and yet being a good citizen in England.

Cicero, though he suffered from the imperious temper of Brutus, speaks of him as one of those, the sight of whom banished his fears and anxieties for the republic. That the most famous and most terrible act of this man's life was an act of republican fanaticism, not of selfish ambition, is proved by his refusing, with magnanimous imprudence, to make all sure, as the more worldly spirits about him suggested, by cutting off Antony and the outer leading partisans of Caesar, and by his permitting public honours to be done to the corpse of the man whom he had immolated to civil duty. One almost shrinks from speaking of the death of Caesar; so much modern nonsense on both sides has been talked about this, the most tragic, the most piteous, and at the same time the most inevitable event of ancient story. Peculiar phases of society have their peculiar sentiments, with reference to which events must be explained. The greased cartridges were the real account of the Indian mutiny. Caesar was slain because he had shown that he was going to assume the title of king. Cicero speaks the literal truth, when he says: that the real murderer was Antony, and the fatal day the day of the Lupercalia, when Antony offered and Caesar faintly put aside the crown. A dictator they would have borne, a king they would not bear, neither then nor for ages afterwards; because the title of king to their minds spoke not of a St. Louis, or an Edward I., or even a Louis XIV., but of the unutterable degradation of the Oriental slave. To use a homely image, if you put your leg in the way of a cannon ball which seems spent, but is still rolling, you will suffer by the experiment. This is exactly what Caesar, in the giddiness of victory and supremacy, did, and the consequence was as certain as it was deplorable. The republican sentiment seemed to him to have entirely lost its force, so that he might spurn it with impunity; whereas, it had in it still enough of the momentum gathered through centuries of republican training and glory to destroy him, to restore the republic for a brief period, and to make victory doubtful at Phillipi. He began by celebrating a triumph over his fellow-citizens, against the generous tradition of Rome: in that triumph he displayed pictures of the tragic deaths of Cato and other Roman chiefs, which disgusted even the populace; he sported with the curule offices, the immemorial objects of republican reverence, so wantonly that he might almost as well have given a consulship to his horse; he flooded the Senate with soldiers and barbarians; he forced a Roman knight to appear upon the stage: at last, craving, as natures destitute of a high controlling principle do crave, for the form as well as the substance of power, he put out his hand to grasp a crown. The feeling on that subject was not only of terrible strength, but was actually embodied in a law by which the state solemnly armed the hand of the private citizen against any man who should attempt to make himself a king. How completely Caesar's insight failed him is proved by the general acquiescence or apathy with which his fall was received, the subdued tone in which even his warm friend Marius speaks of it, and the readiness with which his own soldiers and officers served under the restored republic. We have nothing to do here with any problem of modern ethics respecting military usurpation and tyrannicide, two things which must always stand together in the court of morality. Tyrannicide, like suicide, was the rule of the ancient world, and would have been acknowledged by Caesar himself, before he grasped supreme power, as an established duty. And certainly morality would stretch its bounds to include anything really necessary to protect the Greek and Italian republics, with the treasures which they bore in them for humanity, from the barbarous lust of power which was always lying in wait to devour them. I have said that the spirits of Cato and Cicero lived and worked after their deaths. So I suspect did that of Brutus. The Caesars had no God, no fear of public opinion at home, no general sentiment of civilized nations to control their tyranny. They had only the shadow of a hand armed with a dagger. One shrewd observer of the times at least, if I mistake not, had profited by the lesson of Caesar's folly and fate. To the constitutional demeanour and personal moderation of Augustus the world owes an epoch of grandeur of a certain kind, and an example of true dignity in the use of power. And Augustus, I suspect, had studied his part at the foot of Pompey's statue.

Plutarch parallels Cato with Phocion, Demosthenes with Cicero, Brutus with Dion--the Dion whose history inspired the poem of Wordsworth. Greek republicanism, too, had its fatal hour; but we do not pour scorn and contumely on those who strove to prolong the life of Athens beyond the term assigned by fate. The case of Athens, a single independent state, was no doubt different from that of Rome with so many subject nations under her sway. Still in each case there was the commonwealth, standing in glorious contrast to the barbarous despotisms of other nations, the highest social and political state which humanity had known or for ages afterwards was to know. And this light of civilization was, so far as the last republicans could see, not only to be eclipsed for a time or put out, as now in a single nation, while it burns on in others, but to be swallowed up in hopeless night.

Mr. Charles Norton in the notes to his recent translation of the "Vita Nuova" of Dante quotes a decree made by the commonwealth of Florence for the building of the cathedral.

"Whereas it is the highest interest of a people of illustrious origin so to proceed in their affairs that men may perceive from their external works that their doings are at once wise and magnanimous, it is therefore ordered that Arnulf, architect of our commune, prepare the model or design for the rebuilding of Santa Reparata with such supreme and lavish magnificence, that neither the industry nor the capacity of man shall be able to devise anything more grand or more beautiful, inasmuch as the most judicious in this city have pronounced the opinion, in public and private conferences, that no work of the commune should be undertaken unless the design be such as to make it correspond with a heart which is of the greatest nature because composed of the spirit of many citizens united together in one single will." [Footnote: In his later and very valuable work on _Church Building in the Middle Ages_, Mr. Norton casts doubt on the authenticity of the decree. It is genuine at all events, as an expression of Florentine sentiment, if not as an extract from the archives.]

Let Imperialism, legitimist or democratic, match that! Florence, too, had her political vices, many and grave, she tyrannized over Pisa and other dependants, there was faction in her councils, anarchy, bloody anarchy, in her streets, for her, too, the hour of doom arrived, and the conspiracy of the Pazzi was as much an anachronism as that of the republicans who slew Caesar. But Florence had that heart composed of the united spirits of many citizens out of which came all that the world admires and loves in the works of the Florentine. She produced, though she exiled Dante. That which followed was more tranquil, more orderly perhaps, materially speaking, not less happy, but it had no heart at all.

[The end]
Goldwin Smith's essay: The Last Republicans Of Rome

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