MORE THAN TWO THOUSAND YEARS ago, at a time when the people in the British Isles and in most parts of Western Europe were living the lives of savages, occupied in fighting, hunting, and fishing, dwelling in rude huts, clad in skins, ignorant of everything that we call civilization, Rome was the centre of a world in many ways as civilized as ours is now, over which the Roman people ruled. The men who dwelt in this one city, built on seven hills on the banks of the river Tiber, gradually conquered all Italy. Then they became masters of the lands round the Mediterranean Sea: of Northern Africa and of Spain, of Greece, Egypt, Asia Minor and the Near East, and of Western Europe. The greatness of Rome and of the Roman people does not lie, however, in their conquests. In the end their conquests ruined them. It lies in the character, mind, and will of the Romans themselves.
In the history of the ancient world the Romans played the part that men of our race have played in the history of the modern world. They knew, as we claim to know, how to govern: how to govern themselves, and how to govern other people. To this day much in our laws and in our system of government bears a Roman stamp. They were great soldiers and could conquer: they could also hold and keep their conquests and impress the Roman stamp on all the peoples over whom they ruled. Their stamp is still upon us. Much that belongs to our common life to-day comes to us from them: in their day they lived a life not much unlike ours now. And in many respects the Roman character was like the British. We can see the faults of the Romans, if we cannot see our own; we can also see the virtues. We can see, too—looking back at them over the distance of time, judging them by their work and by what is left to us of their writings—how the mixture of faults in their virtues explains the fall as well as the rise of the great power of Rome.
The Romans were men of action, not dreamers. They were more interested in doing things than in understanding them. They were men of strong will and cool mind, who looked out upon the world as they saw it and, for the most part, did not wonder much about how and why it came to be there. It was there for them to rule. That was what interested them. Ideas they mostly got from other people, especially from the Greeks. When they had got them they could use them and turn them to something of their own. But they were not distracted by puzzling over ideas. Their religion was that of a practical people. In the later days of Rome few educated men believed in the gods. But all the ceremonies and festivals were dedicated to them; and magnificent temples in their honour were erected in which their spirits were supposed to dwell. In the old days every Roman household had its particular images—the Lares and Penates which the head of the family tended and guarded. Connected with this office was the sacred authority of the head of the family—the paterfamilias. His word was law for the members of the household. And the City of Rome stood to its citizens in the place of the paterfamilias. The first laws of a Roman’s life were his duty to his father and to the State. They had an absolute claim on him for all that he could give. The Roman’s code of honour, like the Englishman’s, rested on this sense of duty. A man must be worthy of his ancestors and of Rome. His own life was short, and without honour nothing; the life of Rome went on.
Courage, devotion to duty, strength of will, a great power of silence, a sense of justice rather than any sympathy in his dealings with other men: these were the characteristic Roman virtues. The Roman was proud: he had a high idea of what was due from himself. This was the groundwork out of which his other qualities grew, good and bad. Proud men are not apt to understand the weakness of other people or to appreciate virtues different from their own. The defects of the Romans were therefore hardness, sometimes amounting to cruelty both in action and in judgement; lack of imagination; a blindness to the things in life that cannot be seen or measured. They were just rather than generous. They trampled on the defeated and scorned what they could not understand. They worshipped success and cared little for human suffering. About this, however, they were honest. Sentimentalism was not a Roman vice, nor hypocrisy. When great wealth poured into the city, after the Eastern conquests of Lucullus and Pompeius, the simplicity of the old Roman life was destroyed and men began to care for nothing but luxury, show, and all the visible signs of power. They were quite open about it: they did not pretend that they really cared for other things, or talk about the ‘burden of Empire’.
The heroes of Roman history are men of action. As they pass before us, so far as we can see their faces, hear their voices, know their natures from the stories recorded by those who wrote them down at the time or later, these men stand out in many respects astonishingly like the men of our own day, good and bad. Centuries of dust lie over them. Their bones are crumbled to the dust. Yet in a sense they live still and move among us. Between them and us there lie not only centuries but the great tide of ruin that swept the ancient world away: destroyed it so that the men who came after had to build the house of civilization, stone by stone anew, from the foundation. The Roman world was blotted out by the barbarians. For hundreds of years the kind of life men had lived in Rome disappeared altogether and the very records of it seemed to be lost. Gradually, bit by bit, the story has been pieced together, and the men of two thousand years ago stand before us: we see them across the gulf. The faces of those belonging to the earliest story of Rome are rather dim. But they, too, help us to understand what the Romans were like. We learn to know a people from the men it chooses as its heroes; about whom fathers tell stories to their children. They show what are the deeds and qualities they admire: what kind of men they are trying to be.
THE OLDEST ROMAN STORIES GIVE a description of the coming of the people who afterwards inhabited the city, from across the seas. They tell of the founding of the first township round the Seven Hills, and of the kings, especially of the last seven, who ruled over the people until, for their misdeeds, they were driven out and the very name of King became hateful in Roman ears. Then there are many tales of the wars between the people of Rome and the neighbours dwelling round them on the plains of Latium and among the hills of Etruria and Samnium; and the fierce battles fought against the Gauls who, from time to time, swept down on Italy from the mountains of the north.
These stories do not tell us much that can be considered as actual history. But they do help us to understand what the Romans wished to be like, by showing us the sort of pictures they held up before themselves.
In later times the Romans learned to admire intensely all that came from Greece. The Greeks had been a great ruling people when the Roman State hardly existed: and from them much in Roman life and thought was borrowed. They liked to think that the first settlers on the Tiber bank came from an older finer world than that of the other tribes dwelling in Italy. So they told how, after the great siege of Troy by the Greek heroes, Aeneas, one of the Trojan leaders, fled from his ruined city across the seas, bearing his father and his household gods upon his shoulders, and after many adventures, and some time passed in the great city of Carthage, on the African coast, came with a few trusty companions to the shores of Latium and there founded a new home.
The descendants of Aeneas ruled over their people as kings. In later days, however, the Romans, who held that all citizens were free and equal, hated the name of King. Rome was a republic: its government was carried on by men elected by the citizens from among themselves, and by assemblies in which all citizens could take part. The first duty of every citizen was to the republic: its claim on him stood before all other claims.
The story of the fall of the last king and of Lucius Junius Brutus, one of the first Consuls, as the chief magistrates of the new republic were called, shows clearly how far the idea of duty to the republic could go in the minds of Romans.
Brutus and Tarquin
The last King of Rome was Tarquin the Proud. His misrule, and the insolent heartlessness of his family, especially of his son Sextus, brought about their expulsion from Rome and the end of the kingship. Sextus had, by guile, got into the town of Gabii but was at a loss how to make himself master there. He managed to send out a messenger to his father. It was summer. In the garden where the King was walking, poppies—white and purple—were growing in long ranks. Tarquin said nothing to the messenger: only as he walked he struck off with his staff the heads of the tallest poppies, one after another, without saying a word. Sextus, when the messenger came back and described to him his father’s action, understood. Pitilessly he put the leading men of Gabii to the sword.
It was the misdeeds of this Sextus that brought the proud house of Tarquin to the ground. He tried to force his brutal love on the fair Lucretia, the wife of his cousin Collatinus, and so shamed her that, after telling her husband how she had been wronged, Lucretia killed herself before his eyes and those of his friend Brutus. Stirred to deepest wrath, Collatinus and Brutus then swore a great oath to drive the house of Tarquin from Rome and henceforth allow no king to rule over the free people of the city. When they had told their fellow citizens how Sextus had wronged Lucretia, a daughter of one of the proudest families in the city, and reminded them of the oppression and injustice they had all suffered at the hands of his family, the leading men of Rome rose up and drove the Tarquins out. The city was proclaimed for ever a republic to be ruled not by any one man but by the will and for the good of all free men who dwelt in it. Some there were, however, who took the side of Tarquin and tried to bring him back. Among them were the two sons of Brutus. They were captured and brought up for judgement, and like the others condemned to death. Brutus was the judge. Though they were his sons and he loved them he condemned them unflinchingly. Without any sign of feeling he saw them go to their death. An action for which he would have sentenced another man seemed to him no less wrong when committed by his own children.
The Death of Lucretia
They tried to soothe her grief, laying the blame, not on the unwilling victim, but on the perpetrator of the offence. ‘It is the mind,’ they said, ‘not the body that sins. Where there is no intention, there is no fault,’ ‘It is for you,’ she replied, ‘to consider the punishment that is his due; I acquit myself of guilt, but I do not free myself from the penalty; no woman who lives after her honour is lost shall appeal to the example of Lucretia,’ Then she took a knife which she had hidden under her dress, plunged it into her heart, and dropping down soon expired. Her husband and father made the solemn invocation of the dead.
While the others were occupied in mourning, Brutus drew the knife from the wound, held it still reeking before him, and exclaimed, ‘I swear by this blood, pure and undefiled before the prince’s outrage, and I call you, gods, to witness, that I will punish Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, his impious wife, and all his children with fire and sword to the utmost of my power, and that I will not allow them or any other to rule in Rome.’ After this, he handed the knife to Collatinus, next to Lucretius and Valerius, all amazed at Brutus and perplexed to account for his new spirit of authority. They took the oath as he directed and, changing wholly from grief to anger, they obeyed his summons to follow him and make an immediate end of the royal power.
The body of Lucretia was brought from her house and carried to the Forum, the people thronging round, as was natural, in wonder at this strange and cruel sight, and loud in condemning the crime of Tarquinius. They were deeply moved by the father’s sorrow, and still more by the words of Brutus, who rebuked their tears and idle laments, urging them to act like men and Romans by taking up arms against the common enemy.
Livy, i. 58. 9-59. 4.
Mucius and Cloelia
The same spirit was shown by Caius Mucius and the maiden Cloelia and many others in the long and bitter wars that followed. Tarquin found refuge with Lars Porsena, King of the Etruscans, who pretended to be eager to restore him while he really wanted to submit the Roman people to his own rule. Porsena laid siege to the city and the people were reduced to the hardest straits. A young man named Caius Mucius determined to kill Lars Porsena. He succeeded in passing through the enemy’s lines and made his way into their camp. There he saw a man clad in purple whom he took to be Lars Porsena. In his heart he plunged the dagger he had hidden under the folds of his toga. The man fell dead. But he was not the King. Mucius was carried before Lars and to him he said, ‘I am a Roman, my name Caius Mucius. There are in Rome hundreds of young men resolved, as I was, to take your life or perish in the attempt. You may slay me but you cannot escape them all.’ Porsena demanded the names of the others: Mucius refused to speak. When Porsena said he would compel him to speak by torture Mucius merely smiled. On the altar a flame was burning. To prove to the ally of Tarquin of what stuff the young men of Rome were made, he thrust his right arm into the flame and held it so without flinching until the flesh was charred away. Such, his action showed the King, was the spirit of Rome.
Mucius: The Spirit of Rome
Mucius was escaping through the scared throng, that fell away before his bloody dagger, when, summoned by the shouts, the King’s guards seized him and dragged him back. Standing helpless before the throne, but even in such desperate position more formidable than afraid, he cried out, ‘I am a Roman citizen; my name is Caius Mucius. My purpose was to kill an enemy of my country; I have as much courage to die as I had to slay; a Roman should be ready for great deeds and great suffering. Nor have I alone been emboldened to strike this blow; behind me is a long line of comrades who seek the same honour. Therefore, if you choose, prepare for a struggle in which you will fight for your life every hour of the day and have the sword of an enemy at your palace door. Such is the war that we, the youth of Rome, proclaim against you. You need not fear armies and battles; by yourself you will meet us one by one.’ When the King, enraged and terrified, was threatening to have him thrown into the flames unless he explained the hints of assassination thus vaguely uttered, he replied, ‘See how worthless the body is to those whose gaze is fixed on glory.’ With these words he laid his right hand on a brazier already lighted for the sacrifice and let it burn, too resolute, as it seemed, to feel pain. Then Porsena, astounded at the sight, ordered Mucius to be removed from the altar and exclaimed, ‘Begone, your own desperate enemy more than mine. I would wish well to your valour, if that valour was on the side of my country. As it is, I send you hence unharmed and free from the penalties of war.’
Livy, ii. 12. 8-14.
Later in the same war the Romans were compelled to give hostages, twenty-four men and maidens. Cloelia, a highborn maiden sent among them, escaped at night and on horseback swam across the foaming Tiber to Rome. But since she had been given as a hostage and faith once given was sacred, the Roman leaders sent her back.
Cloelia’s Heroism
This reward granted to the heroism of Mucius inspired women also with ambition to win honour from the people. The maiden Cloelia, one of the hostages, escaped the sentries of the Etruscan camp, which had been pitched near the Tiber, and amid a shower of missiles swam across the river, leading a band of maidens whom she brought back safe to their families in Rome. When Porsena heard of it, he was at first enraged, and sent envoys to the city with a demand for the return of his hostage Cloelia; he made no great account of the others. Afterwards, his anger being changed to admiration, he said that her exploit surpassed anything done by Horatius or Mucius, and declared that he would consider the treaty broken if the hostage was not surrendered, but that if she was, he would send her back unharmed to her people. Faith was kept on both sides; the Romans returned the guarantee of peace in accordance with the terms of the treaty, and the King not only protected but honoured the heroine, making her a present of half the hostages and bidding her choose as she pleased. The story is that when they were brought before her, she picked out the youngest, a choice at once creditable to her modesty and approved by the unanimous wish of the rest that those whose age made them most helpless should be liberated first. After the restoration of peace the Romans recognized this unexampled heroism in a woman with the honour, also unexampled, of an equestrian statue. It was placed at the top of the Sacred Way, a maiden sitting on a horse.
Livy, ii. 13. 6-11.
This same high temper and unflinching sense of honour was shown two hundred years later in an even more splendid way by Atilius Regulus.
Regulus
In the first war against Carthage (255 b.c.) Regulus, a Roman general, was heavily defeated and taken prisoner with a large part of his army. Shortly afterwards the Roman fleet was destroyed by a terrible storm. Nevertheless, the events of the next year’s campaign went against the Carthaginians. They determined to offer peace and for this purpose sent an embassy to Rome. With this embassy Regulus was sent, on the understanding that if he failed to induce his countrymen to make peace and to agree to an exchange of prisoners he would return to Carthage, where, as he well knew, a terrible fate certainly awaited him. Nevertheless, despite the appeals of his wife and children, Regulus urged his countrymen not to make peace. His body might belong to the Carthaginians who had captured it, but his spirit was Roman and no Roman could urge his countrymen to accept defeat and give up fighting until they had won. True to his vow, he went back to Carthage and there he was put to dreadful tortures. His eyelids were cut off and he was then exposed to the full glare of the sun. But the story of his devotion remained strong in the minds of his countrymen, and Horace, one of their great poets, later put it into lines of imperishable verse.
The Honour of Regulus
Such a downfall had the prescient soul of Regulus feared, when he refused assent to dishonourable terms and maintained that the precedent would be fatal in time to come if the prisoners did not die unpitied. ‘I have seen’, he said, ‘our eagles hanging on Carthaginian shrines, and weapons of our soldiers surrendered without bloodshed; I have seen arms bound behind the back of the free, and gates thrown open in security, and lands tilled that our armies had wasted. Think you that the soldier, ransomed with gold, will return the braver? You do but add loss to disgrace. Wool, tinctured by dye, never regains its old purity; nor does true courage, if once it is lost, deign to be restored to the degraded. If the stag fights after being freed from the meshes of the net, he will be brave who has surrendered to a treacherous foe, and he will crush the Carthaginians in a second fight who without resentment has felt the thongs binding his arms, and has feared death. Such a man, all ignorant of the way to win a soldier’s life, has confused peace and war. Oh lost honour! Oh mighty Carthage, exalted by the shameful downfall of Italy!’ It is said that he put from him the lips of his virtuous wife and his little children, a free citizen no longer, and with grim resolution turned his eyes to the ground, till with the weight of advice never given by any before him he strengthened the wavering purpose of the Fathers, and amid the mourning of his friends hurried into a noble exile. Yet, though he knew what the barbarian tormentor had in store for him, he set aside opposing kinsmen and people that would delay his return as quietly as if he were leaving the business of some client’s suit at last decided, and were journeying to his estate in Venefrum or to Tarentum that the Spartan built.
Horace, Od. iii. 5. 13-56.
Marcus Curtius
What were Rome’s most precious possessions? To this question a splendid answer was given by Marcus Curtius. In the midst of the Forum—the market-place in the heart of the city where public business was transacted and men met daily to discuss politics and listen to speeches—the citizens found one morning that a yawning gulf had opened. This, so the priests declared, would not close until the most precious thing that Rome possessed had been thrown into it. Then the republic would be safe and everlasting. For a time men puzzled and pondered over the meaning of this dark saying. Marcus Curtius, a youth who had covered himself with honour in many battles, solved the riddle. Brave men, he said, had made Rome great: the city had nothing so precious. Clad in full armour and mounted on his war-horse he leaped into the gulf. It closed over him at once, nor ever opened again.
The Devotion of Marcus Curtius
During the same year, as the story goes, a cavern of measureless depth was opened in the middle of the Forum, either from the shock of an earthquake or from some other hidden force; and though all did their best by throwing soil into it, the gulf could not be filled up till, warned by the gods, the people began to inquire what was Rome’s greatest treasure. For that treasure, so the prophets declared, must be offered in it, if the Roman commonwealth was to be safe and lasting. Whereupon Marcus Curtius, a warrior renowned in war, rebuked them for doubting whether the Romans had any greater blessing than arms and valour. Amid a general silence he devoted himself, looking to the Capitol and the temples of the immortal gods that overhang the Forum, and stretching out his hands, at one time to the sky, at another to the yawning chasm that reached to the world below. Then, fully armed and seated on a horse splendidly caparisoned, he plunged into its depths, while a crowd of men and women showered corn and other offerings after him. Thus we may suppose that the Curtian Lake got its name from him, and not from Curtius Mettus, in old time the famous soldier of Titus Tatius.
Livy, vii. 6.
In Mucius Scaevola, in Regulus, in Marcus Curtius, and many others the fine qualities of the old Roman temper, pride, courage, will, devotion, a love of their country that went beyond all other feelings, even unto death, stand out. One can see the main lines of the character that made the Romans what they afterwards became—the conquerors and law-givers first of a single city, Rome, then of the whole plain of Latium in which that city stood: then, after driving back barbarian invaders from the north and Greek invaders from the south, of all Italy: later of the known world.
Coriolanus
To understand this character better one may look at it from another angle, studying a man in whom these qualities were spoiled by the faults that belong to them. Courage may become cruelty: pride fall into arrogance: high contempt for others will grow to selfishness and hardness; even a high devotion to one’s country may be spoiled if it comes to mean a devotion to one’s own idea of what that country should be like and how it should treat oneself. It may then be mere selfishness. Many men love their country not as it is but as they think it ought to be. This may be a good and helpful feeling if what they think it ought to be depends not on their own private wishes and welfare only, but on that of the people as a whole. A love of country of this kind makes men strive incessantly to make it better. But some Romans forgot the welfare of the people as a whole. The men belonging to the old families, men who claimed to be descended from the early settlers, who called themselves ‘patricians’, that is, the fathers of the State, were apt to consider that what they thought must be so: that they alone knew what was right and good. The welfare of the State depended on them. They were the leaders in the army and in the government. They had no patience with those who said that they should not settle everything in Rome, that their idea of what was right and patriotic was not the end of the matter; men who said that Rome was not this class or that but the whole people. The city was growing fast; new settlers had come in, men not counted as citizens, but men whose happiness and comfort depended on the way the State treated them. These people, the ‘plebs’ as they were called, were despised by many patricians. They looked upon them not as Romans, but as creatures who could be made into soldiers when the city needed soldiers, but at other times should keep quiet.
The faults and virtues of the patricians—and nearly all the heroes of Roman story belong to patrician families—are well shown in the life of Caius Marcius, called Coriolanus in honour of his victory outside the town of Corioli.
The Capture of Corioli
One of the leading men in the camp was C. Marcius, who afterwards received the name of Coriolanus, a youth of equal vigour in counsel and in action. The Roman army was besieging Corioli and, occupied with its people shut up behind their walls, had no fear of attack from without, when the Volscian troops from Antium swept down upon it, and at the same time the enemy sallied out of the town. Marcius happened to be on duty, and with some picked troops not only repelled the sally, but fearlessly rushed in through the open gate and, after slaughtering the enemy in the neighbourhood, chanced to come across some lighted brands and flung them on to the buildings that adjoined the wall. Then the cries of the townsmen, mingled with the shrieks of women and children that quickly arose, as usual, when the alarm was given, encouraged the Romans and dismayed the Volscians, inasmuch as they found that the city which they had come to help was in the hands of the enemy. Thus the Volscians from Antium were routed and Corioli was taken.
Livy, ii. 33. 5-9.
Caius Marcius belonged to one of the oldest and proudest families in the Republic. A member of this family had been one of the Seven Kings. His father died when Caius was but a boy and he was left in the charge of his mother Volumnia. Volumnia was a woman of noble character and fine mind. Her house was admirably ordered: everything in it was beautiful and yet simple. She brought up her son well: he excelled in all manly exercises, was of a courage that nothing could shake, scorned idleness, luxury, and wealth: believed that the one life for a Roman was a life of service to the death. But Volumnia did not succeed, as a father might have done, in curbing the faults of the lad’s character. Caius grew up headstrong, obstinate, and excessively proud. Personally highly gifted in mind and body, he was disposed to look down upon others less firm and resolute. He set, for himself, a high standard of uprightness and courage, and cared nothing for what other people thought of him. Among the youths with whom he grew up he was the natural leader: his will brooked no contradiction. Few dared to criticize or oppose him. Those less firm in mind, less brave in action, less indifferent to the opinion of others, he despised. Any one who failed in courage, endurance, or devotion he condemned without sympathy.
When but a lad he won, for bravery in battle, the crown of oak leaves given to soldiers who saved the life of a comrade in action. In all the fighting of the hard years in which Rome was defending itself against the other Italian peoples, Marcius was ever to the fore. He shrank from no fatigue, no danger: he was always in the hottest of the fight: first as a simple soldier, then as a general. In the field his soldiers adored him because he shared all their hardships and always led them to victory. Always, too, he refused to take any reward in money or riches. But when these same soldiers got back to Rome Coriolanus had no sympathy with them. Fighting was life to him: he did not see why it should not satisfy every one or understand the hardships of the common man whose wife and children were left behind in wretched poverty. There were indeed many things Coriolanus did not see. His harsh mind condemned without understanding the complaints of the poor. To him it seemed that they thought of themselves, instead of thinking about Rome. He did not realize that their hard lot compelled them to do so. His wealth and birth made him free, but they were not free.