Читать книгу Men and Deeds - John Buchan - Страница 9

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The Roman republic at the start was a community of yeomen dwelling in and around a fortified town. Sovereignty lay with the whole body of citizens, from whom came the laws and the selection of magistrates, and no burgess, save during his tenure of office, had privilege or authority beyond the others. Based upon a disciplined family life, the early commonwealth had the integrity of a household, every member was soldier and law-giver, and every member was a potential commander in the field and civilian chief. But as the state from its military prowess advanced in wealth and added to its domains, this simplicity disappeared, and a privileged class arose, greater in riches and in inherited prestige than the rest. These were the Patricians, the descendants of the first founders, and the early history of the republic is the history of the strife between them and the unprivileged Plebeians. The quarrel was settled by the creation within the whole body of the Populus of a separate corporation, the Plebs, with its own officers and a concurrent right of lawmaking. The constitution was scrupulously balanced, not only as between the Populus and the Plebs, but as between the Populus and the leaders whom it elected. All offices were unpaid and temporary, and each officer was given a colleague whose veto could paralyse his activities, while above them was the Senate, the permanent council of the state. Hence, except for certain legal purposes, the distinction between Patrician and Plebeian lost its importance. A new mixed nobility governed the republic, an aristocracy based on wealth, efficiency, and the inclusion of great officers of state in its ancestry.

Slowly this compact and resolute community enlarged its bounds. It conquered its Latin neighbours and made the other Italian states its docile allies. Before the lapse of six centuries from its foundation it had been forced to carry its arms far beyond the bounds of Italy, and to bring many foreign peoples, as the legal phrase went, ‘in arbitratu, dicione, potestate, amicitiave populi Romani.’ By the beginning of the third century before Christ, Rome had become mistress of the Italian peninsula. In the second century the Macedonian and Punic wars had given her Greece and part of North Africa, and by its close she controlled the whole Mediterranean basin and had fallen heir to the greater part of the empire of Alexander. It was an uneasy suzerainty; her new empire was not integrated under any plan, but presented a baffling collection of diverse polities, and even in Italy itself there was no complete acceptance of her rule. The frontiers, too, were still fluid; in the east, Anatolia was a muttering volcano; beyond it, stretching into the dim spaces of Asia, the Parthian power hung like a thunder-cloud; while to the north and west lay the unconquered Celtic and Germanic peoples, whose strange tumultuous mass movements had already threatened her very citadel.

This miraculous expansion was achieved rather by accident than by design. A bold and adventurous spirit like the elder Scipio accepted it with open eyes; but the majority of Romans drifted into it by the sheer compulsion of facts, and there were not wanting men like the elder Cato, who would have confined the Roman rule to Italy. But the pressure of circumstance was too strong; conquests brought wealth, and money is a potent argument; the governing aristocracy became rapidly a plutocracy, its appetite growing with each success. In spite of itself the City-State had become the Great-State.

Yet it retained its antique urban constitution, and the forms which had sufficed for a simple community of farmers were strained so as to embrace the inhabited globe. A city with less than half a million free denizens, a city-state with less than a million voters, attempted to control a greater domain than Alexander’s. This paradox was matched by the paradox of the constitution itself. The Roman people reigned but did not govern. The permanent governing power was the Senate, which had steered the republic through the great wars of defence and conquest. It prepared the laws for the people to ratify, and received into its body the magistrates whom the people elected. By the end of the second century it had become virtually an oligarchy of office-holding families. The Assembly, the legal sovereign, had less actual power than a king in the most limited of monarchies. The senatorial oligarchy, who gave themselves the name of Optimates as embodying all the traditional wisdom of the state, were resolute to retain their privileges, and exclude from their ranks all ‘new men’ who did not come within that sacred circle which could count curule magistrates in its ancestry. As against it, there grew up the party of the Populares, who laid the emphasis on the rule of the whole community; but the opposition was illusory, since they too accepted the machine of the old city-state, which made impossible any serious popular government. How could the whole nation assemble in the narrow limits of the Field of Mars, and vote intelligently on a question obscurely propounded by a magistrate? The power of the people lay only in the election of officials, and not in decisions on policy, and elections tended consequently to be a sordid business of personal influence and lavish bribes. A superior magistracy carried with it the government of one of the overseas provinces, and therefore ample opportunities for enrichment; so the functions of the sovereign people were limited to deciding which members of the oligarchy should be given the privilege and in return for what largesse.

Such a constitution would have worked badly in a small self-contained state. There was no easy mechanism of change, and emergencies had to be met by special appointments and by the suspension of laws—expedients which brought the normal law into contempt. The Senate was perpetually, as Tacitus said of Pompey, ‘suarum legum auctor ac subversor.’ The administration of the foreign domains was little better than a farce. There was no principle of provincial government, and therefore no continuity; everything depended upon the character of the proconsul. There was no permanent civil service at home or abroad, and the ordering of the city itself was as casual as the administration of Greece and Macedonia. As for public finance, it was naked chaos. The state domains and the tribute due from foreign possessions were farmed out to joint-stock companies of Roman capitalists. The Roman polity at the close of the second century before Christ has been described not unfairly as ‘government by the unpaid aristocrat and exploitation by the irresponsible profiteer.’

In such a commonwealth much will depend upon the armed forces. Rome had travelled far from the citizen militia which had built up her greatness. There is no such guarantee for sobriety in public affairs as the fact that any citizen may have to risk his life for the policy which he approves. Armies were now no longer conscript but volunteer, and the soldier was a professional, enlisted under a particular general for a particular campaign, and looking to that general for his reward. His loyalty was owed to him and not to the state, and the sacramentum, or military oath, was his charter. Such an army of mercenaries put into the hand of a great commander a most potent weapon, for it was his personal following and could be readily used to cut the knots in political dispute.

If the ancient polity of Rome was proving inadequate to the new duties laid upon it, the spirit which had created that polity and had given it value was rapidly disappearing. The strength of the antique Roman character lay in its narrowness, its Calvinistic sense of sin, its austere conception of civic and personal duty, its hardy asceticism, its rigid family ties. Such a type could not adjust itself to novel conditions; if the traditional sanctions were once weakened the whole fabric must crumble. The new Roman had not the gravitas of his ancestors. The opening up to him of Greece and the East had induced new tastes and appetites, and he had fallen under the spell of both the refinements and the luxuries of the Hellenic world. His strict domestic discipline had broken down, and popular opinion admitted extravagances and vices which would have been unthinkable in the old republic. The traditional pietas had largely gone, for Greek philosophy was a sceptical dissolvent of the antique religion. What had once been a faith which governed the homeliest incidents of daily life was now only an antiquarian tradition retained for political purposes. The masses fell back upon blind superstition and exotic cults, and the finer minds sought a refuge in the cosmic speculations of the Greek thinkers, or, like Lucretius, in an austere intellectualism which was a near neighbour to despair. A vague belief in the anima mundi had not the same influence on conduct as the concrete faith which was intertwined with household laws. Doubtless there were many both among the patricians and the new middle class who still stood in the old ways, for it is easy to paint too dark a picture of Roman decadence. There were still those to whom the home was a dominant loyalty, and who could say with Cicero—‘Hic arae sunt, hic foci, hic di penates; hic sacra, religiones, caerimoniae continentur.’ But for the bulk of the people the past was dead, and they had to face new seas and tides without chart or compass.

The older aristocracy, at the close of the second century, had either relapsed upon a barren pride of birth, drawing in their skirts from an unfamiliar world, or had joined with the ‘new men’ in the frantic race for wealth. It was the rise of these new men that made the chief feature of the epoch. The Equites, the upper middle class, were the great capitalists of the day. They farmed the state rents and taxes, contracted for the armies, made fortunes in the slave-trade, and controlled the banks. Usury was one of the main industries of the Roman world, which speculated on a gigantic scale and was perpetually in debt. To be a banker was the readiest way to fortune. The big joint-stock companies made advances to rich and poor, accepted deposits, and by means of a cheque system transferred cash throughout the empire. They played a useful, indeed an indispensable, part, but they were the main agents in furthering the systematic plunder of the provinces by Roman officials, and in encouraging the insensate speculative mania in Rome herself. They were responsible for the fact that half the people were always in debt, and that the cry of repudiation was the stock-in-trade of every demagogue.

Below the business class came the Roman populace, now very mixed in blood. Paying no taxes and bearing no civic burdens, they had nevertheless their votes in the Assembly and were a dangerous powder magazine for sparks. A city like Rome had no corn lands within easy reach, transport was difficult and slow, so it became necessary to organise the food supply. The import and supply of cheap food was a necessity if the people were not to starve, and it was only a step from selling corn below the market-price to distributing it free. The masses lived in huge warrens of slum-tenements (a favourite investment of the new capitalists), and spent most of their time in the Forum and in the streets. The old free artificers and tradesmen were fewer in number, since the great houses with their slaves and freedmen were self-contained economic units, and most of the workers were unskilled labourers. The police system was rudimentary, and both life and property were insecure. The poorer freemen of Rome had become little better than parasites, living largely on doles, kept amused by free shows, accustomed to rioting with little police interference. No demagogue had ever better material for his purpose, so small wonder that demagogy became a recognised profession. The masses were told that they were the real rulers of the world, and, since their life was brutish and uncertain, they would readily welcome any revolution which might give them the fruits of that rule. They had nothing to lose by disorder and much to gain. At the bottom of the social pyramid were the hordes of slaves, that canker of the ancient world. Slavery under the old rural regime had been often a tolerable rule of life with its own dignity; but in the welter of the new capitalist society it was an unmitigated evil. The slaves crowded the freemen out of the arts and crafts, and many of them acquired a potent secret influence over their masters and the conduct of private and public business. In town and country alike they did all the menial work and most of the superior management. In Rome itself they numbered over a quarter of a million. They were of every type, from the artistic and scholarly Greeks to the roughs of the cattle ranches. Here was a vast population of which the state had no control, a private army over which the masters had powers of life and death, a race who owed no loyalty to the commonwealth. Such an element was not only a perpetual danger to the state, but it perverted the moral sense of the best citizens. In it we may find the chief source of the instability of ancient societies, and of that coarseness of fibre which offends us even in what we most deeply admire. With slavery as a sinister background there could be no true humanitas.

The close of the second century was, therefore, for Rome a time of unsettlement and doubt, when to the wisest minds it seemed that the commonwealth had entered upon a decline. It was a period of immense material progress. Rome had most of the world at her feet, and her citizens were growing rich with the accumulated wealth of eastern despotisms. The little town of tufa and stucco, sprawled over its many hills, was rapidly becoming a city of marble. But behind this splendid façade there were signs of decay. The great patrician houses produced either haughty and half-witted reactionaries—‘homines praeposteri’—or degenerates who joined in the scramble for wealth. The middle classes had built up a capitalistic system which was oppressing the overseas provinces, ruining the free agriculture of Italy, and winding the whole people in coils of debt. A false imperialism, based on the interests of the capitalists, regarded the provinces as mere milch-cows from which tribute could be drawn. In Rome herself, a mongrel population, petted and pampered and yet eternally on the verge of famine, had taken the place of the old stalwart freemen, while the slave masses were a perilous undigested element in the body politic. Worse still, the ancient moral standards of personal continence and discipline and of public loyalty were gravely weakened. The aristocracy had become an oligarchy and largely a plutocracy; the Senate was losing the power to govern; and the whole machinery of the state was cracking under burdens for which it had not been designed.

To wise men it was becoming clear that three reforms were overdue. The central government must be put into stronger and cleaner hands; the power of the capitalists to mismanage the public finances and oppress the masses must be curbed; and some means must be found of organising the new empire not as a bundle of alien tributary states, but as one great organic polity. These ideas had scarcely yet come to birth, but they were in the germ, and they meant the renunciation of the former Roman doctrines of government and the narrow bounds of the city-state. The conquests of Alexander and the lessons taught by the Greek political theorists pointed the same moral, for they involved the conception of the earth as one universal society, in which all free men were equal citizens, and of the state not as a city but as a cosmopolis. They involved something more—some opportunism about the nature of the central power, and the abandonment of the old republican rigidity. It was plain to the wise that the affairs of Rome, for all her apparent splendour, were moving fast to a crisis, and the words spoken by Cicero half a century later were already being whispered in secret: ‘No issue can be looked for from discords among the leading men except either universal ruin, or the rule of a conqueror, or a monarchy.’