A History of Rome, Vol 1 by A H.J. Greenidge

A >> A H.J. Greenidge >> A History of Rome, Vol 1

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49

The lack of official support and the alienation of a section of the
people may perhaps be traced in the successive defeats of his
candidature for the curule and plebeian aedileships,[810] although in
the elections to these offices the attention of the people was so keenly
directed to the candidate's pecuniary means as a guarantee of their
gratification by brilliant shows, that the aedileship must have been of
all magistracies the most difficult of attainment by merit unsupported
by wealth. Even when the rejected candidate had won favour on other
grounds, the electors could salve their consciences with the reflection
that the aedileship was no obligatory step in an official career, and
that, where merit and not money was in question, they could show their
appreciation of personal qualities in the elections to the praetorship.
A year after his repulse Marius turned to the candidature for this
office, which conveyed the first opportunity of the tenure of an
independent military command. He was returned at the bottom of the poll,
and even then had to fight hard to retain his place in the praetorian
college.[811] A charge of undue influence was brought against the man
who had struggled successfully to preserve the purity of the Comitia,
and it was pretended that a slave of one of his closest political
associates had been seen within the barriers mixing with the voters.
That the charge was supported by powerful influences, or was generally
believed to be correct, is perhaps shown by the conduct of the censors
of the succeeding year who expelled this associate from the senate.[812]
The jurors[813] before whom the case was tried--representatives, as we
must suppose, of the equestrian order and therefore presumably
uninfluenced by senatorial hostility--were long perplexed by the
conflict of evidence. During the first days of the trial it seemed as
though the doom of Marius was sealed, and his unexpected acquittal was
only secured by the scrutiny of the tablets revealing an equality of
votes, a condition which, according to the rules of Roman process,
necessitated a favourable verdict.

His praetorship, in accordance with the rules which now governed this
magistracy in consequence of the multiplication of the courts of
justice, confined his energies to Rome. We do not know what department
of this office he administered; but, as the charge of no department
could make an epoch in the career of any one but a lawyer gifted with
original ideas, we are not surprised to find that Marius's tenure of
this magistracy, although creditable, did not excite any marked
attention.[814] After his praetorship he obtained his first independent
military command in Farther Spain. Such a province had always its little
problems of pacification to present to an energetic commander, and
Marius's military talents were moderately exercised by the repression of
the habitual brigandage of its inhabitants.[815] His tenure of a foreign
command may have added to his wealth, for provincial government could be
made to increase the means of the most honest administrator. It was
still more important that his tenure of the praetorship had added him to
the ranks of the official nobility. His birth was now no bar to any
social distinction to which his simple and resolute soul might think it
profitable to aspire: and a family of the patrician Julii was not
ashamed to give one of its daughters to the adventurer from
Arpinum.[816] Thus Marius remained for a while; to Roman society an
interesting specimen of the self-made man, marked by a bluntness and
directness appropriate to the type and provocative of an amused regard;
to the professed politician a man with a fairly successful but puzzling
political career, and one that perhaps needed not to be too seriously
considered. For to all who understood the existent conditions of Roman
public life, his attainment of the consulship and of a dominant position
in the councils of the State must have seemed impossible. There was but
one contingency that could make Marius a necessary man. This was war on
a grand scale. But the contingency was distant, and, even if it arose,
the government might employ his skill while keeping him in a
subordinate position.

The career of Marius is not the only proof that the tradition of
successful opposition to the senate could be easily revived. In the year
following his tribunate a new and successful effort was made in the
direction of transmarine colonisation.[817] The pretext for the measure
was the necessity for preserving command of the territory which had been
won by the great victories of Domitius and Fabius on the farther side of
the Alps; the strategic value of the foundation was undeniable, and the
opposition of the government was probably directed by the form which it
was proposed that the new settlement should take. It was not to be a
mere fort in the enemy's country, like the already-established Aquae
Sextiae,[818] but a true _colonia_ of Roman citizens,[819] the creation
of which was certain to lead to excessive complications in the foreign
policy which dealt with the frontiers of the north. Such a colony would
become the centre of an active trade with the surrounding tribes; though
professedly founded in the people's interest, it would rapidly become a
mere feeler for extending the operations of the great mercantile class;
the growth of Roman trade-interests would necessarily involve a policy
of defence and probably of expansion, which would tell heavily on the
resources of the State. The success of the government was dependent on
the restriction of its efforts, and there is nothing surprising in the
hearty opposition which it offered to the projected colony of Narbo
Martius. Even after the original measure sanctioning the settlement had
passed the Comitia, senatorial influence led to the promulgation of a
new proposal in which the people was asked to reconsider its
decision.[820] But the project had found an ardent champion in the young
Lucius Crassus, who strengthened the position which he had won in the
previous year, by a speech weighty beyond the promise of his age.[821]
In his successful advocacy of a national undertaking he was not afraid
to impugn the authority of the senate, and reaped an immediate reward in
being selected, despite his youth, as one of the commissioners for
establishing the settlement.[822]

It is probable that without the support of the equestrian order the
project for the foundation of Narbo Martius might have fallen through.
The man of popular sympathies whose measures attracted their support was
tolerably certain of success, and the man who posed as the champion of
the order was still more firmly placed. The latter position was occupied
for a considerable time by Caius Servilius Glaucia, whose tribunate
probably belongs to the close of the period which we are
describing.[823] Glaucia himself, probably one of those scions of the
nobility whom an original bent of mind had alienated from the narrow
interests of his order, was a man who, lacking in the gift of passionate
but steadfast seriousness which makes the great reformer, possessed
powers admirably adapted for holding the popular ear and inspiring his
auditors with a kind of robust confidence in himself. Ready, acute and
witty,[824] he possessed the happy faculty of taking the Comitia, under
the guise of the plain and honest man, into his confidence. The very
ignorance of his auditors became a respectable attribute, when it was
figured as ingenuous simplicity which needed protection against the
tortuous wiles of the legislator and the official draughtsman. On one
occasion he told his audience that the essence of a law was its
preamble. If, when read to them, it was found to contain the words
"dictator, consul, praetor or magister equitum," the bill was no concern
of theirs. But, if they caught the utterance "and whosoever after this
enactment," then they must wake up, for some new fetter of law was being
forged to bind their limbs.[825] A man of this unconventional type was
not likely to be popular in the senate, and the opprobrious name, which
he subsequently bore in the Curia,[826] is a proof of the liveliness
which he imparted to debate.

At the time of Glaucia's tribunate some subtle movement seems to have
been on foot for undoing the judiciary law of Caius Gracchus and ousting
the knights from their possession of the court before which senators
most frequently appeared. The law which dealt with the crime of
extortion by Roman officials had been frequently renewed, and, whenever
a proposal was made for recasting the enactment with a view to effecting
improvements in procedure, the equestrian tenure of the court was
threatened; for a new law might state qualifications for the jurors
differing from those which had given this department of jurisdiction to
the knights. The relief of the order was therefore great when the
necessary work of revision was undertaken by one who showed himself an
ardent champion of equestrian claims.[827] Glaucia's alteration in
procedure was thorough and permanent. He introduced the system of the
"second hearing "--an obligatory renewal of the trial, which rendered it
possible for counsel to discuss evidence which had been already given,
and for jurors to get a grasp of the mass of scattered data which had
been presented to their notice--[828] and he also made it possible to
recover damages, not only from the chief malefactor, but from all who
had dishonestly shared his spoils.[829] These principles continued to be
observed in trials for extortion to the close of the Republic, and may
have been the only permanent relic of Glaucia's feverish political
career. But for the moment the clauses of his law which dealt with the
qualifications of the jurors, were those most anxiously awaited and most
heartily acclaimed. He had stemmed a reaction and consolidated, beyond
hope of alteration for a long term of years, the system of dual control
established by Caius Gracchus.

The careers and successes of Marius, Crassus and Glaucia exhibit the
spirit of unrest which broke at intervals through the apathetic
tolerance displayed by the people towards the rule of the nobility.
These alternations of confidence and distrust find their counterpart in
the religious history of the times; but a panic springing from a belief
in the anger of the gods was even more difficult to control than the
alarm excited by the attitude of the government. Such a panic knew no
distinctions of station, sex or age; it seized on citizens who cared
nothing for the problems of administration, it was strong in proportion
to the weakness of its victims, and gathered from the dark thoughts and
wild words of the imbecile the poison which infected the sober mind and
assumed, from the very universality of the sickness, the guise of a
healthy effort at rooting out some deep-seated pollution from the State.
The gloomy record of the religious persecutions of the past made it
still more difficult for a government, which prided itself on the
retention of the ancient control of morals, which gloried in its
monopoly of an historic priesthood that had often set its hand to the
work of extirpation, to stifle such a cry. The demand for atonement was
the voice of the conserver of Rome's moral life, of the patriotic
devotee who was striving earnestly to reclaim the waning favour of her
tutelary gods. If it was further believed that the seat of the
corruption was to be found amidst the families of the nobility itself,
the last barrier to resistance had been broken down, for even to seem to
shield the unholy thing was to make its lurking place an object of
horror and execration.

The nerves of the people were first excited by various prodigies that
had appeared; a confirmation of their fears might have been found in the
utter destruction of the army of Porcius Cato in Thrace;[830] and a
strange calamity soon gave an index to the nature of the offence which
excited the anger of the gods. When Helvius, a Roman knight, was
journeying with his wife and daughter from Rome to Apulia, they were
enveloped in a sudden storm. The alarm of the girl urged the father to
seek shelter with all speed. The horses were loosed from the vehicle,
the maiden was placed on one, and the party was hastening along the
road, when suddenly there was a blinding flash and, when it had passed,
the young Helvia and her horse were seen prone upon the ground. The
force of the lightning had stripped every garment and ornament from her
body, and the dead steed lay a few paces off with its trappings riven
and scattered around it.[831] Death by a thunderbolt had always a
meaning, which was sometimes hard to find; but here the gods had not
left the inquiring votary utterly in doubt. The nakedness of the
stricken maiden was a riddle that the priests could read. It was a
manifest sign that a virginal vow had been broken, and that some of the
keepers of the eternal fire were tainted with the sin of unchastity. The
destruction of the horse seemed to portend that a knight would be found
to be a partner in the crime.[832] Evidence was invited and was soon
forthcoming. The slave of a certain Barrus came forward and deposed to
the corruption of three of the vestal virgins, Aemilia, Licinia and
Marcia.[833] He pretended that the incestuous intercourse had been of
long standing, and he named his own master amongst many other men whom
he declared to be the authors of the sacrilege. The maidens were
believed to have added to their lovers to screen their first offence;
the sacrifice of their honour became the price of silence; and their
first corrupters were forced to be dumb when jealousy was mastered by
fear. The knowledge of the crime is believed to have been widely spread
amongst the circles of the better class, until the conspiracy of silence
was broken down by the action of a slave,[834] and all who would not be
deemed accomplices were forced to add their share to the weight of the
accusing testimony.

A scandal of this magnitude called for a formal trial by the supreme
religious tribunal, and towards the close of the year[835] Lucius
Metellus, the chief pontiff, summoned the incriminated vestals before
the college. Aemilia was condemned, but Licinia and Marcia were
acquitted. There was an immediate outcry; the pontiff's leniency was
severely censured; and the anger and fear of the people emboldened a
tribune, Sextus Peducaeus, to propose for the first time that the
secular arm should wrest from the pontifical college the spiritual
jurisdiction that it had abused. He carried a resolution that a special
commission should be established by the people to continue the
investigation.[836] The judges were probably Roman knights after the
model of the Gracchan jurors; the president was the terrible Lucius
Cassius Longinus, already known for his severity as a censor and famed
for his penetration as a criminal judge. This fatal penetration, which
had endowed his tribunal with the nickname "the reef of the
accused," [837] was now welcomed as a surety that the inquiry would be
searching, and that the innocence which survived it would be so well
established that all doubt and fear would be dissolved. This commission
condemned, not only the two vestals whom the pontiffs had acquitted, but
many of their female intermediaries as well.[838] Some of their supposed
paramours must also have been convicted; amongst the accused was Marcus
Antonius, who was in future days to share the realm of oratory with
Lucius Crassus. He was on the eve of his departure to Asia, where he was
to exercise the duties of a quaestor, when he was summoned to appear
before the court over which Cassius presided. He might have pleaded the
benefit of his obligation to continue his official duties;[839] but he
preferred to waive his claim and face his judges. His escape was
believed to have been mainly due to the heroic conduct of a young slave,
who, presented of his own free will to the torture, bore the anguish of
the rack, the scourge and the fire without uttering a word that might
incriminate his master.[840] The free employment of such methods in
trials for incest throws a grave doubt on the value of the judgment
which they elicited; and, when a court is established for the purpose of
appeasing the popular conscience, a part at least of its conduct may be
easily suspected of being preordained. Cassius's rigour in this matter
was thought excessive;[841] but, even had he and the jurors meted out
nothing but the strictest justice, the memory of their sentence would
long have rankled in the minds of the influential families whose members
they had condemned, and thus perpetuated the tradition of their
unnecessary severity. It may be doubted, however, whether a secular
court was competent to inflict the horrible penalties of pontifical
jurisdiction, to condemn the vestal to a living grave and her paramour
to death by the scourge;[842] interdiction, and perhaps in the more
serious cases the death by strangling usually reserved for traitors, may
have been meted out to the men, while the women may have been handed
over to their relatives for execution. But even this exemplary
visitation of the vices which lurked in the heart of the State was not
deemed sufficient to appease the gods or to quiet the popular
conscience. To punish the guilty was to offer the barest satisfaction to
heaven and to conscience; a fuller atonement was demanded, and the
Sibylline oracles, when consulted on the point, were understood to
ordain the cultivation of certain strange divinities by the living
sacrifice of four strangers, two of Hellenic and two of Gallic
race.[843] The accomplishment of this act must have been a severe strain
on the reason and conscience of a government which sixteen years later
absolutely prohibited the performance of human sacrifice[844] and soon
made efforts to stamp out the barbarous ritual even in its foreign
dependencies.[845] Even this concession to the panic of the times could
not be regarded as fraught with much worldly success. The gods seemed
still to retain an unkind feeling both to the city and the government.
Two years later there was a return of dreadful prodigies, and a great
part of Rome was laid waste by a terrible fire. A few months more and
news was brought from Africa which shook to its very foundations the
fabric of senatorial rule.[846]

CHAPTER VI

The land, on which the eyes of the world were soon to be fastened, was
the neglected protectorate which had been built up to secure the
temporary purpose of the overthrow of Carthage, and had since remained
in the undisturbed possession of the peaceful descendants of Masinissa.
The fortunes of the kingdom of Numidia, so far as they affected that
kingdom itself, deserved to be neglected by its suzerain; for the power
which Masinissa had won by arms and diplomacy was more than sufficient
to protect its own interests. The Numidia of the day formed in
territorial extent one of the mightiest kingdoms of the world, and
ranked only second to Egypt amongst the client powers of Rome.[847] It
extended from Mauretania to Cyrenaica,[848] from the river Muluccha to
the greater Syrtis, thus touching on the west the Empire of the Moors,
at that time confined to Tingitana, on the east almost penetrating to
Egypt, and enjoying the best part of the fertile region which borders
the coast of the Mediterranean.[849] For the Moroccan boundary of the
kingdom--the river Muluccha or Molocath--see Goebel _Die Westkueste
Afrikas im Altertum_ pp. 79,80. From this vast tract of country Rome had
cut out for herself a small section on the north-east. In the creation
of the province of Africa her moderation and forbearance must have
astonished her Numidian client; and, if Masinissa showed signs of
hesitancy in rousing himself for the destruction of Carthage, the fears
of his sons must have been immediately dispelled when they saw the
slender profits which Rome meant to reap from the suppression of their
joint rival. The Numidian kings were even allowed to keep the territory
which had been wrested from Carthage between the Second and Third Punic
Wars. This comprised the region about the Tusca, which boasted not less
than fifty towns, the district known as the Great Plains,[850] which has
been identified with the great basin of the Dakhla of the
Oulad-bon-Salem, and probably the plateau of Vaga (Bedja) which
dominates this basin.[851] The Roman lines merely extended from the
Tusca (the Waed El-Kebir) in the North, where that river flows into the
Mediterranean opposite the island of Thabraca (Tabarka) to Thenae
(Henschir Tina) on the south-east.[852] But even the upper waters of the
Tusca belonged to Numidia, as did the towns of Vaga, Sicca Veneria and
Zama Regia. Consequently the Roman frontier must have curved eastward
until it reached the point where a rocky region separates the basin of
the Bagradas (Medjerda) from the plains of the Sahel; thence it ran to
the neighbourhood of Aquae Regiae and thence, probably following the
line of a ditch drawn between the two great depressions of Kairouan and
El-Gharra, to its ultimate bourne at Thenae.[853] It is clear that the
Romans did not look on their province as an end desirable in itself.
They had left in the hands of their Numidian friends some of the most
fertile lands, some of the richest commercial towns, situated in a
district which they might easily have claimed. Against such annexation
Masinissa could have uttered no word of legitimate protest. His kingdom
had already been almost doubled by the acquisition of the lands of his
rival Syphax, and his sons saw themselves through the aid of Rome in
possession of an artificially created kingdom, which was so entirely out
of harmony with the traditions of Numidian life that it could scarcely
have entered into the dreams of any prince of that race. But the
conquering city reposed some faith in gratitude, and reposed still more
in its habitual policy of caution. The province which it created was
simply a political and strategic necessity. It was intended to secure
the negative object of preventing the reconstitution of the great
political and commercial centre which had fallen.[854] If Carthage was
never to rise again, a fragment of the coast-line must be kept in the
hands of the possessors of its devastated site. It might have been
better for the peace of Africa had the Romans been a little more
grasping and had the Roman position been stronger than it was. The
Phoenicians scattered along the coast had become familiar objects to the
Berber inhabitants and their kings; to the enlightened monarch they were
a valuable addition to the population of any of his cities--all the more
valuable now that they were politically powerless. But with the Roman
official and the Roman trader it was different. Here was an alien and
(in spite of the restraint of the government) an encroaching
civilisation, utterly unfamiliar to the eyes of the natives, but known
to justify its lordly security by that dim background of power which
clung to the name of the paramount city of the West. The Roman
possessions were an ugly eyesore to a man who held that Africa should be
for the Africans. The wise Masinissa might tolerate the spectacle,
content (as, indeed, he should have been) with the power and security
which Rome's friendship had brought to her ally. But it remained to be
seen whether his views would always be held by his own subjects or by
some less cautious or less happily placed successor of his own line.

It was indeed possible that a hostile feeling of nationality might be
awakened beyond the limits even of the great kingdom of Numidia. The
designations which the Romans employ for the natives of North Africa
obscure the fact, which was recognised in later times by the Arab
conquerors, of the unity of the great Berber folk.[855] Roman historians
and geographers speak of the Numidians and Mauretanians as though they
were distinct peoples; but there can be little doubt that, then as
to-day, they were but two fractions of the same great race, and that
even the wild Gaetulians of the South are but representatives of the
parent stock of this indigenous people. As in the case of nearly all
races which in default of historical data we are forced to call
indigenous, two separate elements may be distinguished in this stock, an
earlier and a later, and survivals of the original distinctions between
these elements were clearly discernible in many parts of Northern
Africa; but, as the fusion between these stocks had been effected in
prehistoric times, a common Berber nationality may be held to have
extended from the Atlantic almost to Egypt, at the time when the Romans
were added to the immigrant Semites and Greeks who had already sought to
dwell amidst its borders. The basis of this nationality is thought to be
found in the aborigines of the Sahara who had gradually moved up from
the desert to the present littoral. There they were joined by a race of
another type who were wending their way from what is now the continent
of Europe. The Saharic man was of a dark-brown colour but with no traces
of the negroid type. His European comrade was a man of fair complexion
and light hair; and these curiously blended races continued to live side
by side and to form a single nation, preserving perhaps each some of its
own psychical characteristics, but speaking in common the language of
the older Saharic stock.[856] But the two races were not uniformly
distributed over the various territories of Northern Africa. The white
race was perhaps more in evidence in Mauretania, as it is in the Morocco
of to-day;[857] the dark race was probably most strongly represented
amongst the Gaetulians of the South. There were, in short, in Northern
Africa two zones, marked by differences of civilisation as well as of
ethnic descent, which were clearly distinguished in antiquity. The first
is represented by the Afri, Numidians, and Moors, who inhabited the
coast region from East to West. These were early subjected to alien
influences, the greatest of which, before the coming of the Roman, was
the advent of the Semite. The second is shown by the vast aggregate of
tribes which form a curve along the south from the ocean to the
Cyrenaica. These tribes, which were called by the common name of
Gaetuli, were almost exempt from European influences in historic, and
probably in prehistoric, times. A few intermingled with the Aethiopians
of the Sahara,[858] but, taken as a whole, they are believed to
represent the primitive race of brown Saharic dwellers in all
its purity.