LITMIR.BIZ

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he left children behind him to fill his place. There is no doubt that either legally or irregularly Latini did migrate to Rome and did so obtain the citizenship, but we know no more. Others say that the later right by which a Latin obtained the citizenship in virtue of filling a magistracy in his native town existed already.

      [Sidenote: The Socii.] Of the Socii, all or many of them had treaties defining their relations to Rome, and were therefore known as Foederatae Civitates. They had internal self-government, but were bound to supply Rome with soldiers, ships, and sailors.

      [Sidenote: Grievances of the Latins and allies.] At the time of the Gracchi discontent was seething among the Latins and allies. There were two classes among them—the rich landlords and capitalists, who prospered as the rich at Rome prospered, and the poor who were weighed down by debt or were pushed out of their farms by slave-labour, or were hangers-on of the rich in the towns and eager for distributions of land. The poor were oppressed no doubt by the rich men both of their own cities and of Rome. The rich chafed at the intolerable insolence of Roman officials. It was not that Rome interfered with the local self-government she had granted by treaty, but the Italians laboured under grievous disabilities and oppression. So late as the Jugurthine war, Latin officers were executed by martial law, whereas any Roman soldier could appeal to a civil tribunal. Again, while the armies had formerly been recruited from the Romans and the allies equally, now the severest service and the main weight of wars fell on the latter, who furnished, moreover, two soldiers to every Roman. Again, without a certain amount of property, a man at Rome could not be enrolled in the army; but the rule seems not to have applied to Italians. Nor was the civil less harsh than the military administration. A consul's wife wished to use the men's bath at Teanum; and because the bathers were not cleared out quickly enough, and the baths were not clean enough, M. Marius, the chief magistrate of the town, was stripped and scourged in the market-place. A free herdsman asked in joke if it was a corpse that was in a litter passing through Venusia, and which contained a young Roman. Though not even an official, its occupant showed that, if lazy, he was at least alive, by having the peasant whipped to death with the litter straps. In short, the rich Italians would feel the need of the franchise as strongly as the old plebeians had felt it, and all the more strongly because the Romans had not only ceased to enfranchise whole communities, but were chary of giving the citizenship even to individuals. The poor also had the ordinary grievances against their own rich, and were so far likely to favour the schemes of any man who assailed the capitalist class, Roman or Italian, as a whole; but they none the less disliked Roman supremacy, and would be easily persuaded to attribute to that supremacy some of the hardships which it did not cause.

      [Sidenote: State of the transmarine provinces.] While such fires were slowly coming to the surface in Italy, and were soon to flame out in the Social War, the state of the provinces out of the peninsula was not more reassuring. The struggle with Viriathus and the Numantine war had revealed the fact that the last place to look for high martial honour or heroic virtue was the Roman army. If a Scipio sustained the traditions of Roman generalship, and a Gracchus those of republican rectitude, other commanders would have stained the military annals of any nation. [Sidenote: Deterioration of Roman generalship.] Roman generals had come to wage war for themselves and not for the State. They even waged it in defiance of the State's express orders. If they found peace in the provinces, they found means to break it, hoping to glut their avarice by pillage or by the receipt of bribes, which it was now quite the exception not to accept, or to win sham laurels and cheap triumphs from some miserable raid on half-armed barbarians. Often these carpet-knights were disgracefully beaten, though infamy in the provinces sometimes became fame at Rome, and then they resorted to shameful trickery repeated again and again. [Sidenote: and of the Army.] The State and the army were worthy of the commanders. The former engaged in perhaps the worst wars that can be waged. Hounded on by its mercantile class, it fought not for a dream of dominion, or to beat back encroaching barbarism, but to exterminate a commercial rival. The latter, which it was hard to recruit on account of the growing effeminacy of the city, it was harder still to keep under discipline. It was followed by trains of cooks, and actors, and the viler appendages of oriental luxury, and was learning to be satisfied with such victories as were won by the assassination of hostile generals, or ratified by the massacre of men who had been guaranteed their lives. The Roman fleet was even more inefficient than the army; and pirates roved at will over the Mediterranean, pillaging this island, waging open war with that, and carrying off the population as slaves. A new empire was rising in the East, as Rome permitted the Parthians to wrest Persia, Babylonia, and Media from the Syrian kings. The selfish maxim, Divide et impera, assumed its meanest form as it was now pursued. It is a poor and cowardly policy for a great nation to pit against each other its semi-civilised dependencies, and to fan their jealousies in order to prevent any common action on their part, or to avoid drawing the sword for their suppression. Slave revolts, constant petty wars, and piracy were preying on the unhappy provincials, and in the Roman protectorate they found no aid. All their harsh mistress did was to turn loose upon them hordes of money-lenders and tax-farmers ('negotiatores,' and 'publicani'), who cleared off what was left by those stronger creatures of prey, the proconsuls. Thus the misery caused by a meddlesome and nerveless national policy was enhanced by a domestic administration based on turpitude and extortion.

      [Sidenote: Universal degeneracy of the Government, and decay of the nation.] Everywhere Rome was failing in her duties as mistress of the civilised world. Her own internal degeneracy was faithfully reflected in the abnegation of her imperial duties. When in any country the small-farmer class is being squeezed off the land; when its labourers are slaves or serfs; when huge tracts are kept waste to minister to pleasure; when the shibboleth of art is on every man's lips, but ideas of true beauty in very few men's souls; when the business-sharper is the greatest man in the city, and lords it even in the law courts; when class-magistrates, bidding for high office, deal out justice according to the rank of the criminal; when exchanges are turned into great gambling-houses, and senators and men of title are the chief gamblers; when, in short, 'corruption is universal, when there is increasing audacity, increasing greed, increasing fraud, increasing impurity, and these are fed by increasing indulgence and ostentation; when a considerable number of trials in the courts of law bring out the fact that the country in general is now regarded as a prey, upon which any number of vultures, scenting it from afar, may safely light and securely gorge themselves; when the foul tribe is amply replenished by its congeners at home, and foreign invaders find any number of men, bearing good names, ready to assist them in robberies far more cruel and sweeping than those of the footpad or burglar'—when such is the tone of society, and such the idols before which it bends, a nation must be fast going down hill.

      A more repulsive picture can hardly be imagined. A mob, a moneyed class, and an aristocracy almost equally worthless, hating each other, and hated by the rest of the world; Italians bitterly jealous of Romans, and only in better plight than the provinces beyond the sea; more miserable than either, swarms of slaves beginning to brood over revenge as a solace to their sufferings; the land going out of cultivation; native industry swamped by slave-grown imports; the population decreasing; the army degenerating; wars waged as a speculation, but only against the weak; provinces subjected to organized pillage; in the metropolis childish superstition, whole sale luxury, and monstrous vice. The hour for reform was surely come. Who was to be the man?

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CHAPTER II.

       Table of Contents

      TIBERIUS GRACCHUS.

      [Sidenote: Scipio Aemilianius.] General expectation would have pointed to Scipio Aemilianus, the conqueror of Numantia and Carthage, and the foremost man at Rome. He was well-meaning and more than ordinarily able, strict and austere as a general, and as a citizen uniting Greek culture with the old Roman simplicity of life. He was full of scorn of the rabble, and did not scruple to express it. 'Silence,' he cried, when he was hissed for what he said about his brother-in-law's death, 'you step-children of Italy!' and when this enraged them still more, he went on: 'Do you think I shall fear you whom I brought to Italy in fetters now that you are loose?' He showed equal scorn for such pursuits as at Rome at least were associated with

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