Читать книгу Men and Deeds - John Buchan - Страница 10

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In the last century of the republic there was no dearth of would-be reformers. The ills of the state were not hard to diagnose, but there was little agreement about the cure. There were the idolaters of the past, the antiquarians, who tried to achieve the impossible and revive creeds and manners that had gone. There were the enlightened aristocrats who strove to marry what was best in the old and new cultures, and to create a type of Roman in whom a liberal philosophy should not weaken the ancient fibre. Such an one was the younger Scipio, the perfect example of a Roman gentleman, wise, moderate, urbane, clear-sighted; but he was as ineffective to cure the mischief as was Lord Falkland to stem the tide of the English Civil War. The trouble needed more drastic surgery.

The first of the rough surgeons were the two Gracchi, the grandsons of the great Scipio Africanus. The elder, Tiberius, who was born in 163, grappled with the eternal land question, and as tribune carried an agrarian law to make state lands, illegally held by the big landowners, available for settlement by landless citizens. When the opposition to his policy proved too strong to be met by constitutional methods, he summoned a bodyguard from the pavement, and at the age of thirty was crushed in that arbitrament of force to which he had appealed. He tried to build his authority on the popular Assembly, but no serious democracy could be based on what had become a farcical piece of mechanism. Gaius, the younger brother, carried on the work of the dead Tiberius, but with a bolder hand and a wider vision. As tribune he stretched the tribunician power to its extreme limits, and presently passed beyond them into what was constitutionally rebellion. There is scarcely a conception of the later reformers which is not to be found in the policy of Gaius Gracchus. His aim seems to have been to create a perpetual magistracy based on the tribunician power, to transfer the practical sovereignty from the Senate to the popular Assembly and the middle classes, and to replace the city-state by an Italian nation. But such a course meant a defiance of the existing law, and he had not the force behind him for successful revolution. The varied antagonisms which he had roused coalesced against him, and his end was a violent death. One lesson stood out from the failure of the brothers for all to read. For a reformer a bodyguard from the pavement was not enough; he must have behind him an army.

Presently appeared the popular leader with the army, but he was not the stuff of which revolutionary statesmen are made. Gaius Marius, the son of a Latin farmer, rose from the ranks to be commander-in-chief against Jugurtha, and became consul fourteen years after the death of the younger Gracchus. He recast the army on a democratic basis, rolled back the invasion of the Cimbri and the Teutons, and became the virtual dictator of Rome. But Marius was only a peasant of genius, slow-witted, inelastic, a good soldier but a blundering politician. Seven times he was consul, and when he returned to Rome as conqueror he was naturally called to the leadership of the Populares. But he was in the hands of demagogues, who professed to carry out the dreams of Gaius Gracchus without comprehending their true purpose. The uneasy alliance dissolved, Marius dropped out of public life, and the senatorial party won the triumph which falls to those who know their own minds. An attempt at reform from the side of the moderate aristocrats succeeded no better, and its leader, Livius Drusus, went the way of the Gracchi. But the silencing of protesting voices could not bring peace; the incompetence of the Senate, the greed of the capitalists, the unrest of the Roman mob, and the discontent of the unenfranchised Italians remained; and at the close of the first decade of the last century before Christ all Italy was in the throes of insurrection.

Some reconstruction was inevitable, even if it were only temporary and partial, and to this task a remarkable man set his hand. Lucius Cornelius Sulla was sprung from one of the oldest of the patrician houses, and had spent his youth as a dissolute man of fashion and an amateur of art and letters. But the war with Jugurtha revealed to him his exceptional military talent, and thenceforth he was above all things a soldier, with a soldier’s contempt for political squabbles. The honours of the last phase of the North African campaign fell to him, he played a leading part in the defeat of the Cimbri and the Teutons and in quelling the Italian revolt, and earlier he had, as propraetor in Asia, patched up a truce with Mithridates of Pontus. He was consul when Mithridates took the field again and crossed the Bosphorus and overran Greece, and he was appointed to command against the most formidable foe that Rome had known since Hannibal. But he was suspected by the popular party, and by a decree of the people the charge of the war against Mithridates was entrusted to Marius.

Sulla did not hesitate. He had little respect for aristocracy, capitalists or rabble, but he was determined to defend his country, and he had no belief in his old leader. He marched his six legions on Rome, took the city, and lit his watch-fires in the market-place, while Marius fled to the salt marshes of Minturnae. He proceeded to put together an interim constitution, the basis of which was the degradation of the Assembly and the restoration of the right of initiative to the Senate. Otherwise he allowed the Gracchan innovations to stand. Then, leaving as he well knew no secure settlement behind him, he embarked his legions for the East. This contemptuous grandee, with his piercing blue eyes and blotched face ‘like a floury mulberry,’ was cynical about all things but one: he hated cant and bungling, and was resolute to face realities. The major problem was to crush Mithridates, and he was ready to let politics at Rome drift into chaos so long as this task was accomplished. So with 30,000 men and no fleet he set out against a conqueror who had command of the sea and of armies unnumbered, and already controlled every Roman domain east of the Adriatic except a fragment of Macedonia.

Sulla was absent for four years, and meantime Rome was in anarchy. The popular party, with Cinna at its head, repealed the Sullan acts, old Marius returned from exile, and there followed a great massacre of opponents. Marius, savage, drunken and now half insane, passed in 86 to a dishonoured death, and till 84 Cinna was virtually tyrant of Rome. He had no serious policy, beyond revenge upon his enemies and sops to the mob, but under his rule the rights of citizenship were finally confirmed to all Italy south of the Po. Anxiously he kept his eyes on the East, where month by month Sulla was moving steadily on his career of conquest. Nothing perturbed that extraordinary man. When Rome sent a general to replace him, he won over the general’s troops, and he made his own armies his loyal personal following. He finished his immediate task, made terms with Mithridates, and in 83 returned to Italy, with a veteran army and ample treasure. Some of the ablest of the officers who had taken service under Cinna joined him, like the young Pompey and the young Marcus Crassus, the government levies melted before him, and in a battle at the very gates of Rome the last stand of the Populares was broken. Sulla was made dictator for such time as he pleased to hold office, with absolute power over the lives of Romans and the laws of Rome.

He was too humorous and too cynical to be cruel for cruelty’s sake, and the terrible proscription which followed had a reasoned purpose—to get rid for good of troublesome opponents, and to discourage for the future performances like those of Marius and Cinna. Then, before retiring to the leisure which he had amply earned and the pleasures which were his main interest in life, he set to work to remake the constitution. He despised alike the mob and the aristocracy, but concluded that the latter was ‘the more natural beast of the twain,’ so the object of his changes was to aggrandise the Senate, teach the middle class its place, and put the rabble in bonds. One thing he did not touch; he left the Roman citizenship to the Italians, for he saw the folly of again stirring up that secular strife. Also, like the Gracchi, he established many new colonies, chiefly of his former soldiers, who, he believed, would act as a guard for his new regime. He increased the numbers of the Senate, made it an oligarchy of officials by confining its membership to those who had held the higher magistracies, and secured to it the legislative initiative. He established a strict cursus honorum, and weakened the tribunate by imposing a heavy fine for the improper use of the veto, and laying it down that a tribune was disqualified from standing for a higher office. He abolished the corn doles. He took the jury-courts away from the Equites and restored them to the Senate, and he dealt a heavy and just blow at the capitalists by putting an end to the farming of the revenues of Asia and making each province levy its own tribute.

There was much that was good in his reconstruction. If Sulla is to be credited with any principle, it was a belief in the republic, and he sincerely thought that he was restoring republican institutions. He had given the Roman oligarchy a last chance. It was not an aristocratic restoration, for there was no real aristocracy left, but it was an attempt to create an efficient bureaucracy backed by an efficient police. It solved no one of Rome’s greater problems, such as the relation of the new mercenary armies to the civil power, or the absorption of the provinces into the Roman polity. But Sulla was not concerned with the dim future; it was enough for him to set the old machine going again, so that he could withdraw to the life of ease which he loved. A cynic to the core, he feared danger no more than he feared the mouthings of the demagogues. Though many thousands desired his death, he laid down his dictator’s power and retired calmly to the life of the sportsman, the epicure, and the literary dilettante. A year later, fortunate to the last, he died peacefully in his bed. All Italy stood around his pyre, and the women of Rome mourned him for a year.

The Sullan reconstruction left, as I have said, the main blemishes in the state untouched. It put the government into the hands of an official oligarchy who had lost the talent for government, and had in any case at their disposal a most unworkable machine. The narrow city-state had gone, but a body of citizens scattered throughout the Italian peninsula were no better fitted to administer an empire. Moreover, the credulous and undisciplined urban mob had still ample power to make mischief. It did not take from the capitalists the opportunities of public plunder. It did not diminish the opposition between Optimates and Populares, between those who had and those who had not, but the opposition had become merely opportunist and had no serious basis of principle. Cicero defined the Optimates as those who said and did what pleased the best men, but the word ‘best’ was equivocal. There were among the Optimates stiff relic-worshippers, republicans of the old rock, who had forgotten nothing and learned nothing; but there were also moderate men, especially among the jurists, who saw the necessity of reform. In the ranks of the Populares were shallow radicals who worshipped phrases and bankrupts who hungered for revolution, but there were also many solid citizens who resented the contempt of the aristocrats, and all the classes proscribed by Sulla, and the aspiring young men who always draw to an opposition. One thing was clear. Politics had become the profession of every ambitious Roman, and everywhere political clubs and coteries were springing up like weeds. Through politics alone a man could win to wealth and high civil and military command.

Such was the view of a young cadet of the great Julian house just back from the East, whose candid eyes were now surveying the Roman scene.