When the suppression of the Cinnan revolution, which threatened the existence of the senate, rendered it possible for the restored senatorial government to devote the requisite attention to the internal and external security of the empire, various matters presented themselves, the settlement of which could not be postponed without injuring the most important interests and allowing present inconveniences to grow into future dangers. Apart from the very serious complications in Spain, it was absolutely necessary effectually to check the barbarians in Thrace and the regions of the Danube, whom Sulla on his march through Macedonia had only been able slightly to chastise (iii. 309), and to regulate, by military intervention, the disorderly state of things along the northern frontier of the Greek peninsula; thoroughly to suppress the bands of pirates infesting the seas everywhere, but especially the eastern waters; and to introduce better order into the unsettled relations of Asia Minor. The peace which Sulla had concluded in 670 with Mithra-dates, king of Pontus (iii. 308), and of which the treaty with Murena in 673 (iii. 345) was essentially a repetition, bore throughout the stamp of a provisional arrangement to meet the exigencies of the moment; and the relations of the Romans with Tigranes, king of Armenia, with whom they had de facto waged war, remained wholly untouched in this peace.

LA PHRATRIE ET LA CURIE; LA TRIBU.

Nous n'avons présenté jusqu'ici et nous ne pouvons présenter encore aucune date. Dans l'histoire de ces sociétés antiques, les époques sont plus facilement marquées par la succession des idées et des institutions que par celles des années.

L’étude des anciennes règies du droit privé nous a fait entrevoir, par delà les temps qu'on appelle historiques, une période de siècles pendant lesquels la famille fut la seule forme de société. Cette famille pouvait alors contenir dans son large cadre plusieurs milliers d’êtres humains. Mais dans ces limites l'association humaine était encore trop étroite: trop étroite pour les besoins matériels, car il était difficile que cette famille se suffît en présence de toutes les chances de la vie; trop étroite aussi pour les besoins moraux de notre nature, car nous avons vu combien dans ce petit monde l'intelligence du divin était insuffisante et la morale incomplète.

La petitesse de cette société primitive répondait bien à la petitesse de l'idée qu'on s’était faite de la divinité. Chaque famille avait ses dieux, et l'homme ne concevait et n'adorait que des divinités domestiques. Mais il ne devait pas se contenter longtemps de ces dieux si fort au-dessous de ce que son intelligence peut atteindre. S'il lui fallait encore beaucoup de siècles pour arriver à se représenter Dieu comme un être unique, incomparable, infini, du moins il devait se rapprocher insensiblement de cet idéal en agrandissant d’âge en âge sa conception et en reculant peu â peu l'horizon dont la ligne sépare pour lui l‘Être divin des choses de la terre.

L'idée religieuse et la société humaine allaient done grandir en même temps.

When the course of history turns from the miserable monotony of the political selfishness, which fought its battles in the senate-house and in the streets of the capital, to matters of greater importance than the question whether the first monarch of Rome should be called Gnæus, Gaius or Marcus, we may well be allowed—on the threshold of an event, the effects of which still at the present day influence the destinies of the world—to look round us for a moment, and to indicate the point of view under which the conquest of what is now France by the Romans, and their first contact with the inhabitants of Germany and of Great Britain, are to be regarded in connexion with the general history of the world.

By virtue of the law, that a people which has grown into a state absorbs its neighbours who are in political nonage, and a civilized people absorbs its neighbours who are in intellectual nonage—by virtue of this law, which is as universally valid and as much a law of nature as the law of gravity—the Italian nation (the only one in antiquity which was able to combine a superior political development and a superior civilization, though it presented the latter only in an imperfect and external manner) was entitled to reduce to subjection the Greek states of the East which were ripe for destruction, and to dispossess the peoples of lower grades of culture in the West—Libyans, Iberians, Celts, Germans—by means of its settlers; just as England with equal right has in Asia reduced to subjection a civilization of rival standing but politically impotent, and in America and Australia has marked and ennobled, and still continues to mark and ennoble, extensive barbarian countries with the impress of its nationality.

We have already seen how wretched was the state of the affairs of Rome by land and sea in the East, when at the commencement of 687 Pompeius with an almost absolute plenitude of power undertook the conduct of the war against the pirates. He began by dividing the immense field committed to him into thirteen districts and assigning to each of these districts a lieutenant, for the purpose of equipping ships and men there, of searching the coasts, and of capturing piratical vessels or chasing them into the meshes of a colleague. He himself went with the best part of the ships of war that were available—among which on this occasion also those of Rhodes were distinguished—early in the year to sea, and swept in the first place the Sicilian, African, and Sardinian waters, with a view especially to reestablish the supply of grain from these provinces to Italy. His lieutenants meanwhile addressed themselves to the clearing of the Spanish and Gallic coasts. It was on this occasion that the consul Piso attempted from Rome to prevent the levies which Marcus Pomponius the legate of Pompeius instituted by virtue of the Grabinian law in the province of Narbo—an imprudent proceeding, to check which, and at the same time to keep the just indignation of the multitude against the consul within legal bounds, Pompeius temporarily reappeared in Rome (P. 108).

The commission for distributing the domains

Tiberius Gracchus was dead; but his two works, the distribution of land and the revolution, survived their author. In presence of the starving agricultural proletariate the senate might venture on a murder, but it could not avail itself of that murder to annul the Sempronian agrarian law; the law itself had been far more strengthened than shaken by the frantic outbreak of party fury. The party of the aristocracy friendly towards reform, which openly favoured the distribution of the domains—headed by Quintus Metellus, just about this time (623) censor, and Publius Scævola -in concert with the party of Scipio Æmilianus, which was at least not disinclined to reform, gained the upper hand for the time being even in the senate; and a decree of the senate expressly directed the triumvirs to begin their labours. According to the Sempronian law these were to be nominated annually by the community, and this was probably done; but from the nature of their task it was natural that the election should fall again and again on the same men, and new elections in the proper sense occurred only when a place became vacant through death.

Ferment in Italy

The state of suspense and uncertainty existing in Italy when Sulla took his departure for Greece in the beginning of 667 has been already described; the half-suppressed insurrection, the principal army under the more than half-usurped command of a general whose politics were very doubtful, the confusion and the manifold activity of intrigue in the capital. The victory of the oligarchy by force of arms had, in spite or because of its moderation, made various classes discontented. The capitalists, painfully affected by the blows of the most severe financial crisis which Home had yet witnessed, were indignant at the government on account of the law which it had issued as to interest, and on account of the Italian and Asiatic wars which it had not prevented. The insurgents, so far as they had laid down their arms, bewailed not only the disappointment of their proud hope that they would obtain equal rights with the ruling burgesses, but also the forfeiture of their venerable treaties and their new position as subjects utterly destitute of rights. The communities between the Alps and the Po were likewise discontented with the partial concessions made to them, and the new burgesses and freedmen were exasperated by the cancelling of the Sulpician laws. The populace of the city suffered amid the general distress, and found it intolerable that the government of the sabre was no longer disposed to acquiesce in the constitutional rule of the bludgeon.

Paramount ascendancy of Latinism Hellenism

Latinism

In the great struggle of the nationalities throughout the wide range of the Roman empire, the secondary nations seem at this period on the wane or disappearing. The most important of them all, the Phoenician, received through the destruction of Carthage a mortal wound from which it slowly bled to death. The districts of Italy, which had hitherto preserved their old language and manners, Etruria and Samnium, were not only visited by the heaviest blows of the Sullan reaction, but were compelled also by the political levelling of Italy to adopt the Latin language and customs in public intercourse, so that the old native languages were reduced to popular dialects which soon decayed. There no longer appears throughout the bounds of the Roman state any nationality entitled even to compete with the Roman and the Greek. On the other hand the Latin nationality was, as respected both the extent of its diffusion and the depth of its hold, in the most decided ascendant. As after the Social war any portion of Italian soil might belong to any Italian in full Roman ownership, and any god of an Italian temple might receive Roman gifts; as in all Italy with the exception of the region beyond the Po the Roman law thenceforth had exclusive authority superseding all other civic and local laws; so the Roman language at that time became the universal language of business, and soon likewise the universal language of civilized intercourse, in the whole peninsula from the Alps to the Sicilian Straits. But it no longer restricted itself to these natural limits.

External and internal bankruptcy of the Roman state

We have traversed a period of ninety years—forty years of internal profound peace, fifty of an almost constant revolution. It is the most inglorious epoch known in Roman history. It is true that the Alps were crossed both in an easterly and westerly direction (P. 168, 177), and the Roman arms reached in the Spanish peninsula as far as the Atlantic Ocean (P. 18) and in the Macedono-Grecian peninsula as far as the Danube (P. 177); but the laurels thus gained were as cheap as they were barren. The circle of the “extraneous peoples under the will, sway, dominion, or friendship of the Roman burgesses,” was not materially extended; men were content to realize the gains of a better age and to bring the communities attached to Rome in laxer forms of dependence more and more into full subjection. Behind the brilliant screen of provincial reunions was concealed a very sensible decline of Roman power. While the whole ancient civilization was daily more and more distinctly embraced in the Roman state and received in it a more general recognition, the nations excluded from it began simultaneously beyond the Alps and beyond the Euphrates to pass from defence to aggression. On the battle-fields of Aquae Sextise and Vercellae, of Chseronea and Orchomenus, were heard the first peals of that thunder-storm, which the Germanic tribes and the Asiatic hordes were destined to bring upon the Italo-Grecian world, and the last dull rolling of which has reached almost to our own times. But in internal development also this epoch bears the same character. The old organization collapses irretrievably.

The Subjects

On the abolition of the Macedonian monarchy, the supremacy of Rome was not only an established fact from the Pillars of Hercules to the mouths of the Nile and the Orontes, but, as if it were the final decree of fate, pressed on the nations with all the weight of an inevitable necessity, and seemed to leave them merely the choice of perishing in hopeless resistance or in hopeless endurance. If history were not entitled to insist that the earnest reader should accompany her through good and evil days, through landscapes of winter as well as of spring, the historian might be tempted to shun the cheerless task of tracing the manifold and yet monotonous turns of this struggle between power and weakness, both in the Spanish provinces already annexed to the Roman empire and in the African, Hellenic, and Asiatic territories which were still treated as clients of Rome. But, however unimportant and subordinate the individual conflicts may appear, they possess collectively a deep historical significance; and, in particular, the state of things in Italy at this period is only intelligible in the light of the reaction which the provinces exercised over the mother-country.

Spain

In addition to the territories which may be regarded as natural appendages of Italy—in which, however, the natives were still far from being completely subdued, and Ligurians, Sardinians, and Corsicans were, not greatly to the credit of Rome, continually furnishing occasion for “village-triumphs”—the formal sovereignty of Rome at the commencement of this period was established only in the two Spanish provinces, which embraced the larger eastern and southern portions of the peninsula beyond the Pyrenees.

Vacancy in the government

The new structure, which Gaius Gracchus had reared, became on his death a ruin. His death indeed, like that of his brother, was primarily a mere act of vengeance; but it was at the same time a very material step towards the restoration of the old constitution, when the person of the monarch was taken away from the monarchy just as it was on the point of being established. It was all the more so in the present instance, because after the fall of Gaius and the sweeping and bloody prosecutions of Opimius there existed at the moment absolutely no one, who, either through relationship to the fallen chief of the state or through pre-eminent ability, could feel himself warranted in even attempting to occupy the vacant place. Gaius had departed from the world childless, and the son whom Tiberius had left behind him died before reaching manhood; the whole popular party, as it was called, was literally without any one who could be named as leader. The Gracchan constitution resembled a fortress without a commander; the walls and garrison were uninjured, but the general was wanting, and there was no one to take possession of the vacant place save the very government which had been overthrown.

There stored aristocracy

So it accordingly happened. After the decease of Gaius Gracchus without heirs, the government of the senate as it were spontaneously resumed its sway; and this was the more natural, that it had not been, in the strict sense, formally abolished by Gaius Gracchus, but had only been reduced to a nullity in point of fact by his exceptional proceedings.