The Beginnings of Rome

For a period of nearly ten years Rome and Italy had been distracted by civil war. Sulla (q.v.) was now called upon to heal the divisions which rent the State asunder, to set in working again the machinery of civil government, and above all so to modify it as to meet the altered conditions, and to fortify it against the dangers which visibly threatened it in the future. The real charge against Sulla is not that he failed to accomplish all this, for to do so was beyond the powers even of a man so able, resolute and self-confident as Sulla, armed though he was with absolute authority and backed by overwhelming military strength and the prestige of unbroken success. He stands con victed rather of deliberately aggravating some and culpably ignoring others of the evils he should have tried to cure, and of contenting himself with a party triumph when he should have aimed at the regeneration and confirmation of the whole State. His victory was instantly followed, not by any measures of con ciliation, but by a series of massacres, proscriptions and confisca tions, of which almost the least serious consequence was the imme diate loss of life which they entailed. From this time forward the fear of proscription and confiscation recurred as a possible consequence of every political crisis, and it was with difficulty that Caesar himself dissipated the belief that his victory would be followed by a Sullan reign of terror. The legacy of hatred and discontent which Sulla left behind him was a constant source of disquiet and danger. In the children of the proscribed, whom he excluded from holding office, and the dispossessed owners of the confiscated lands, every agitator found ready and willing allies. The moneyed men of the equestrian order were more than ever hostile to the senatorial government, which they now identified with the man who cherished towards them a peculiar hatred, and whose creatures had hunted them down like dogs. The at tachment which the new Italian citizens might in time have learnt to feel for the old republican constitution was nipped in the bud by the massacres at Praeneste and Norba, by the harsh treat ment of the ancient towns of Etruria, and by the ruthless desola tion of Samnium and Lucania. Quite as fatal were the results to the economic prosperity of the peninsula. Sulla's confiscations, following on the civil and social wars, opened the doors wide for a long train of evils. The veterans whom he planted on the lands he had seized did nothing for agriculture, and swelled the grow ing numbers of the turbulent and discontented. The "Sullan men" became as great an object of fear and dislike as the "Sullan reign." The latifundia increased with startling rapidity—whole territories passing into the hands of greedy partisans. Wide tracts of land, confiscated but never allotted, ran to waste. In many districts of Italy the free population finally and completely disappeared from the open country; and life and property were rendered insecure by the brigandage which now developed un checked, and in which the herdsmen slaves played a prominent part. The outbreaks of Spartacus in 73, and of Catiline ten years later, were significant commentaries on this part of Sulla's work. His constitutional legislation, while it included many use ful administrative reforms, is marked by as violent a spirit of partisanship, and as apparently wilful a blindness to the future. The re-establishment on a legal basis of the ascendancy which custom had so long accorded the senate was his main object. With this purpose he had already, when consul in 88, made the senatus auctoritas legally necessary for proposals to the assembly. He now as dictator followed this up by crippling the power of the magistracy, which had been the most effective weapon in the hands of the senate's opponents. The legislative freedom of the tribunes was already hampered by the necessity of obtaining the senate's sanction ; in addition, Sulla restricted their wide powers of in terference (intercessio) to their original purpose of protecting individual plebeians, and discredited the office by prohibiting a tribune from holding any subsequent office in the State. The control of the courts (quaestiones perpetuae) was taken from the equestrian order and restored to the senate. To prevent the peo ple from suddenly installing and keeping in high office a second Marius, he re-enacted the old law against re-election, and made legally binding the custom which required a man to mount up gradually to the consulship through the lower offices. His increase of the number of praetors from six to eight, and of quaestors to 20, though required by administrative necessities, tended, by en larging the numbers and further dividing the authority of the magistrates, to render them still more dependent upon the central direction of the senate. Lastly, he replaced the pontifical and au gural colleges in the hands of the senatorial nobles, by enacting that vacancies in them should, as before the lex Domitia (104), be filled up by co-optation. It cannot be said that Sulla was success ful in fortifying the republican system against the dangers which menaced it from without. He accepted as an accomplished fact the enfranchisement of the Italians, but he made no provision to guard against the consequent reduction of the comitia to an ab surdity, and with them of the civic government which rested up on them, or to organize an effective administrative system for the Italian communities. In fact he prevented the further registra tion of the new citizens by abolishing the censorship. Of all men, too, Sulla had the best reason to appreciate the dangers to be feared from the growing independence of governors and generals in the provinces and from the transformation of the old civic militia into a group of professional armies, devoted only to a successful leader, and with the weakest possible sense of allegiance to the State. He had himself, as proconsul of Asia,

contemptuously and successfully defied the home Government, and he, more than any other Roman general, had taught his sol diers to look only to their leader, and to think only of booty. Yet, beyond a few inadequate regulations, there is no evidence that Sulla dealt with these burning questions, the settlement of which was among the greatest of the achievements of Augustus. One administrative reform of real importance must, lastly, be set down to his credit. The judicial procedure first established in for the trial of cases of magisterial extortion in the provinces, and applied between 149 and 8i to cases of treason and bribery. Sulla extended so as to bring under it the chief criminal offences, and thus laid the foundation of the Roman criminal law.

Overthrow of the Sullan Constitution.

The Sullan sys tem stood for nine years, and was then overthrown—as it had been established—by a successful soldier. It was the fortune of Cn. Pompey, a favourite officer of Sulla, first of all to violate in his own person the fundamental principles of the constitution re established by his old chief, and then to overturn it. In Spain the Marian governor Q. Sertorius (see SERTORIUS) had defeated one after another of the proconsuls sent out by the senate, and was already in 77 master of all Hither Spain. To meet the crisis, Pompey (q.v.), who was not yet 3o, and had never held even the quaestorship, was sent out to Spain with proconsular authority. Still Sertorius held out, until in 73 he was foully murdered by his own officers. The native tribes who had loyally stood by him submitted, and Pompey early in 71 returned with his troops to Italy, where, during his absence in Spain, an event had occurred which had shown Roman society with startling plainness how near it stood to revolution. In 73 Spartacus (q.v.), a Thracian slave, escaped with 7o others from a gladiators' training school at Capua. In a startlingly short time he found himself at the head of 70,000 runaway slaves, outlaws, brigands and impover ished peasants, and for two years terrorized Italy, routed the legions sent against him, and even threatened Rome. He was at length defeated and slain by the praetor, M. Licinius Crassus, in Apulia. In Rome itself the various classes and parties hostile to the Sullan system had, ever since Sulla's death in 78, been inces santly agitating for the repeal of his most obnoxious laws, and needed only a leader in order successfully to attack a Government discredited by failure at home and abroad. With the return of Pompey from Spain their opportunity came. Pompey, who under stood politics as little as Marius, was anxious to obtain a triumph, the consulship for the next year (7o), and as the natural conse quence of this an important command in the East. The opposition wanted his name and support, and a bargain was soon struck. Pompey and with him Marcus Licinius Crassus, the real con queror of Spartacus, were elected consuls, almost in the presence of their troops, which lay encamped outside the gates in readiness to assist at the triumph and ovation granted to their respective leaders. Pompey lost no time in performing his part of the agree ment. The tribunes regained their prerogatives. The "perpetual courts" (quaestiones perpetuae) were taken out of the hands of the senatorial indices, who had outdone the equestrian order in scandalous corruption, and finally the censors, the first since 86 B.c., purged the senate of the more worthless and disreputable of Sulla's partisans. The victory was complete ; but for the future its chief significance lay in the clearness with which it showed that the final decision in matters political lay with neither of the two great parties in Rome, but with the holder of the military authority. The tribunes ceased to be political leaders and became lieutenants of the military commanders, and the change was fatal to the dignity of politics in the city. Men became conscious of the unreality of the old constitutional controversies, indifferent to the questions which agitated the forum and the curia, and contemptuously ready to alter or disregard the constitution itself when it stood in the way of interests nearer to their hearts.

Pompey, Caesar and Cicero.

When his consulship ended, Pompey impatiently awaited at the hands of the politicians he had befriended the further gift of a foreign command. He de clined an ordinary province, and from the end of 7o to 67 he remained at Rome in a somewhat affectedly dignified seclusion.

But in 67 and 66 the laws of Gabinius and Manilius gave him all and more than all that he expected (see POMPEY). By the for mer he obtained the sole command for three years against the Mediterranean pirates. He was to have supreme authority over all Roman magistrates in the provinces throughout the Medi terranean and over the coasts for 5om. inland. Fifteen legati, all of praetorian rank, were assigned to him, with 200 ships, and as many troops as he thought desirable. The Manilian law trans ferred from Lucullus and Glabrio to Pompey the conduct of the Mithridatic War in Asia, and with it the entire control of Roman policy and interests in the East. The unrepublican character of the position thus granted to Pompey, and the dangers of the precedent established, were clearly enough pointed out by such moderate men as Q. Lutatius Catulus, the "father of the senate," and by the orator Hortensius—but in vain. Both laws were sup ported, not only by the tribunes and the populace, but by the whole influence of the publicani and negotiatores, whose interests in the East were at stake.