The History of Rome, Book V - Theodor Mommsen
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THE HISTORY OF ROME, BOOK V
The Establishment of the Military Monarchy
by
THEODOR MOMMSEN
Translated with the Sanction of the Author
by
William Purdie Dickson, D.D., LL.D.
Professor of Divinity in the University of Glasgow
A New Edition Revised throughout and Embodying Recent Additions
Preparer's Notes
This work contains many literal citations of and references to words,
sounds, and alphabetic symbols drawn from many languages, including
Gothic and Phoenician, but chiefly Latin and Greek. This English
language Gutenberg edition, constrained within the scope of 7-bit
ASCII code, adopts the following orthographic conventions:
1) Words and phrases regarded as "foreign imports", italicized
in the original text published in 1903; but which in the intervening
century have become "naturalized" into English; words such as "de jure",
"en masse", etc. are not given any special typographic distinction.
2) Except for Greek, all literally cited non-English words that do not
refer to texts cited as academic references, words that in the source
manuscript appear italicized, are rendered with a single preceding,
and a single following dash; thus, -xxxx-.
3) Greek words, first transliterated into Roman alphabetic equivalents,
are rendered with a preceding and a following double-dash; thus, --xxxx--.
Note that in some cases the root word itself is a compound form such as
xxx-xxxx, and is rendered as --xxx-xxx--
4) Simple non-ideographic references to vocalic sounds, single letters,
or alphabeic dipthongs; and prefixes, suffixes, and syllabic references
are represented by a single preceding dash; thus, -x, or -xxx.
5) The following refers particularly to the complex discussion
of alphabetic evolution in Ch. XIV: Measuring and Writing). Ideographic
references, meaning pointers to the form of representation itself rather
than to its content, are represented as -"id:xxxx"-. "id:" stands for
"ideograph", and indicates that the reader should form a mental picture
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Followed by the form in lowercase. Such exotic parsing is necessary
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or even for a number of sounds in the same language at different
times. Thus, -"id:GAMMA gamma" might very well refer to a Phoenician
construct that in appearance resembles the form that eventually
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of lowercase. Also, a construct such as --"id:E" indicates a symbol
that in graphic form most closely resembles an ASCII uppercase "E",
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6) The numerous subheading references, of the form "XX. XX. Topic"
found in the appended section of endnotes are to be taken as "proximate"
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in the endnote indicates primarily the location in the main text
of the closest indexing "handle", a subheading, which may or may not
echo congruent subject matter.
The reason for this is that in the translation from an original
paged manuscript to an unpaged "cyberscroll", page numbers are lost.
In this edition subheadings are the only remaining indexing "handles"
of sub-chapter scale. Unfortunately, in some stretches of text these
subheadings may be as sparse as merely one in three pages. Therefore,
it would seem to make best sense to save the reader time and temper
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7) The attentive reader will notice occasional typographic or syntactic
anomalies and errors. In almost all cases this conscious and due to
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To the end of each volume is appended a table of conversion between
the two systems.
CONTENTS
BOOK V: The Establishment of the Military Monarchy
CHAPTER
I. Marcus Lepidus and Quintus Sertorius
II. Rule of the Sullan Restoration
III. The Fall of the Oligarchy and the Rule of Pompeius
IV. Pompeius and the East
V. The Struggle of Parties during the Absence of Pompeius
VI. Retirement of Pompeius and Coalition of the Pretenders
VII. The Subjugation of the West
VIII. The Joint Rule of Pompeius and Caesar
IX. Death of Crassus--Rupture between the Joint Rulers
X. Brundisium, Ilerda, Pharsalus, and Thapsus
XI. The Old Republic and the New Monarchy
XII. Religion, Culture, Literature, and Art
BOOK FIFTH
The Establishment of the Military Monarchy
Wie er sich sieht so um und um,
Kehrt es ihm fast den Kopf herum,
Wie er wollt' Worte zu allem finden?
Wie er mocht' so viel Schwall verbinden?
Wie er mocht' immer muthig bleiben
So fort und weiter fort zu schreiben?
Goethe.
Chapter I
Marcus Lepidus and Quintus Sertorius
The Opposition
Jurists
Aristocrats Friendly to Reform
Democrats
When Sulla died in the year 676, the oligarchy which he had
restored ruled with absolute sway over the Roman state; but,
as it had been established by force, it still needed force
to maintain its ground against its numerous secret and open foes.
It was opposed not by any single party with objects clearly
expressed and under leaders distinctly acknowledged, but by a mass
of multifarious elements, ranging themselves doubtless
under the general name of the popular party, but in reality opposing
the Sullan organization of the commonwealth on very various grounds
and with very different designs. There were the men of positive
law who neither mingled in nor understood politics, but who detested
the arbitrary procedure of Sulla in dealing with the lives
and property of the burgesses. Even during Sulla's lifetime,
when all other opposition was silent, the strict jurists resisted
the regent; the Cornelian laws, for example, which deprived various
Italian communities of the Roman franchise, were treated
in judicial decisions as null and void; and in like manner the courts
held that, where a burgess had been made a prisoner of war and sold
into slavery during the revolution, his franchise was not forfeited.
There was, further, the remnant of the old liberal minority
in the senate, which in former times had laboured to effect
a compromise with the reform party and the Italians, and was now
in a similar spirit inclined to modify the rigidly oligarchic
constitution of Sulla by concessions to the Populares.
There were, moreover, the Populares strictly so called,
the honestly credulous narrow-minded radicals, who staked property
and life for the current watchwords of the party-programme,
only to discover with painful surprise after the victory
that they had been fighting not for a reality, but for a phrase.
Their special aim was to re-establish the tribunician power, which Sulla
had not abolished but had divested of its most essential prerogatives,
and which exercised over the multitude a charm all the more mysterious,
because the institution had no obvious practical use and was
in fact an empty phantom--the mere name of tribune of the people,
more than a thousand years later, revolutionized Rome.
Transpadanes
Freedmen
Capitalists
Proletarians of the Capital
The Dispossessed
The Proscribed and Their Adherents
There were, above all, the numerous and important classes
whom the Sullan restoration had left unsatisfied, or whose political
or private interests it had directly injured. Among those
who for such reasons belonged to the opposition ranked the dense
and prosperous population of the region between the Po and the Alps,
which naturally regarded the bestowal of Latin rights in 665(1)
as merely an instalment of the full Roman franchise, and so afforded
a ready soil for agitation. To this category belonged also
the freedmen, influential in numbers and wealth, and specially
dangerous through their aggregation in the capital, who could
not brook their having been reduced by the restoration to their
earlier, practically useless, suffrage. In the same position
stood, moreover, the great capitalists, who maintained a cautious
silence, but still as before preserved their tenacity of resentment
and their equal tenacity of power. The populace of the capital,
which recognized true freedom in free bread-corn, was likewise
discontented. Still deeper exasperation prevailed among
the burgess-bodies affected by the Sullan confiscations--whether
they like those of Pompeii, lived on their property curtailed
by the Sullan colonists, within the same ring-wall with the latter,
and at perpetual variance with them; or, like the Arretines
and Volaterrans, retained actual possession of their territory,
but had the Damocles' sword of confiscation suspended over them
by the Roman people; or, as was the case in Etruria especially,
were reduced to be beggars in their former abodes, or robbers
in the woods. Finally, the agitation extended to the whole family
connections and freedmen of those democratic chiefs who had lost
their lives in consequence of the restoration, or who were wandering
along the Mauretanian coasts, or sojourning at the court
and in the army of Mithradates, in all the misery of emigrant exile;
for, according to the strict family-associations that governed
the political feeling of this age, it was accounted a point of honour(2)
that those who were left behind should endeavour to procure for exiled
relatives the privilege of returning to their native land, and,
in the case of the dead, at least a removal of the stigma attaching
to their memory and to their children, and a restitution to the latter
of their paternal estate. More especially the immediate children
of the proscribed, whom the regent had reduced in point of law
to political Pariahs,(3) had thereby virtually received from the law
itself a summons to rise in rebellion against the existing
order of things.
Men of Ruined Fortunes
Men of Ambition
To all these sections of the opposition there was added the whole
body of men of ruined fortunes. All the rabble high and low,
whose means and substance had been spent in refined or in vulgar
debauchery; the aristocratic lords, who had no farther mark
of quality than their debts; the Sullan troopers whom the regent's
fiat could transform into landholders but not into husbandmen,
and who, after squandering the first inheritance of the proscribed,
were longing to succeed to a second--all these waited only
the unfolding of the banner which invited them to fight against
the existing order of things, whatever else might be inscribed on it.
From a like necessity all the aspiring men of talent, in search
of popularity, attached themselves to the opposition; not only
those to whom the strictly closed circle of the Optimates denied
admission or at least opportunities for rapid promotion,
and who therefore attempted to force their way into the phalanx
and to break through the laws of oligarchic exclusiveness and seniority
by means of popular favour, but also the more dangerous men,
whose ambition aimed at something higher than helping to determine
the destinies of the world within the sphere of collegiate intrigues.
On the advocates' platform in particular--the only field of legal
opposition left open by Sulla--even in the regent's lifetime
such aspirants waged lively war against the restoration with the weapons
of formal jurisprudence and combative oratory: for instance,
the adroit speaker Marcus Tullius Cicero (born 3rd January 648),
son of a landholder of Arpinum, speedily made himself a name
by the mingled caution and boldness of his opposition to the dictator.
Such efforts were not of much importance, if the opponent desired
nothing farther than by their means to procure for himself a curule
chair, and then to sit in it in contentment for the rest of his life.
No doubt, if this chair should not satisfy a popular man
and Gaius Gracchus should find a successor, a struggle for life
or death was inevitable; but for the present at least no name could
be mentioned, the bearer of which had proposed to himself
any such lofty aim.
Power of the Opposition
Such was the sort of opposition with which the oligarchic government
instituted by Sulla had to contend, when it had, earlier than
Sulla himself probably expected, been thrown by his death
on its own resources. The task was in itself far from easy, and it
was rendered more difficult by the other social and political evils
of this age--especially by the extraordinary double difficulty
of keeping the military chiefs in the provinces in subjection
to the supreme civil magistracy, and of dealing with the masses
of the Italian and extra-Italian populace accumulating in the capital,
and of the slaves living there to a great extent in de facto freedom,
without having troops at disposal. The senate was placed
as it were, in a fortress exposed and threatened on all sides,
and serious conflicts could not fail to ensue. But the means
of resistance organized by Sulla were considerable and lasting;
and although the majority of the nation was manifestly disinclined
to the government which Sulla had installed, and even animated
by hostile feelings towards it, that government might very well
maintain itself for a long time in its stronghold against
the distracted and confused mass of an opposition which was not agreed
either as to end or means, and, having no head, was broken up
into a hundred fragments. Only it was necessary that it should
be determined to maintain its position, and should bring
at least a spark of that energy, which had built the fortress,
to its defence; for in the case of a garrison which will not
defend itself, the greatest master of fortification constructs
his walls and moats in vain.
Want of Leaders
Coterie-Systems
The more everything ultimately depended on the personality
of the leading men on both sides, it was the more unfortunate
that both, strictly speaking, lacked leaders. The politics of
thisperiod were thoroughly under the sway of the coterie-system
in its worst form. This, indeed, was nothing new; close unions
of families and clubs were inseparable from an aristocratic
organizationof the state, and had for centuries prevailed in Rome.
But it was not till this epoch that they became all-powerful,
for it was only now (first in 690) that their influence was attested
rather than checked by legal measures of repression.
All persons of quality, those of popular leanings no less than
the oligarchy proper, met in Hetaeriae; the mass of the burgesses
likewise, so far as they took any regular part in political events
at all, formed according to their voting-districts close unions
with an almost military organization, which found their natural
captains and agents in the presidents of the districts, "tribe-
distributors" (-divisores tribuum-). With these political clubs
everything was bought and sold; the vote of the elector especially,
but also the votes of the senator and the judge, the fists too
which produced the street riot, and the ringleaders who directed
it--the associations of the upper and of the lower ranks
were distinguished merely in the matter of tariff. The Hetaeria
decided the elections, the Hetaeria decreed the impeachments,
the Hetaeria conducted the defence; it secured the distinguished
advocate, and in case of need it contracted for an acquittal
with one of the speculators who pursued on a great scale lucrative
dealings in judges' votes. The Hetaeria commanded by its compact bands
the streets of the capital, and with the capital but too often the state.
All these things were done in accordance with a certain rule,
and, so to speak, publicly; the system of Hetaeriae was better organized
and managed than any branch of state administration; although there was,
as is usual among civilized swindlers, a tacit understanding
that there should be no direct mention of the nefarious proceedings,
nobody made a secret of them, and advocates of repute were not ashamed
to give open and intelligible hints of their relation to the Hetaeriae
of their clients. If an individual was to be found here or there
who kept aloof from such doings and yet did not forgo public life,
he was assuredly, like Marcus Cato, a political Don Quixote.
Parties and party-strife were superseded by the clubs and their rivalry;
government was superseded by intrigue. A more than equivocal
character, Publius Cethegus, formerly one of the most zealous
Marians, afterwards as a deserter received into favour by Sulla,(4)
acted a most influential part in the political doings
of this period--unrivalled as a cunning tale-bearer and mediator
between the sections of the senate, and as having a statesman's
acquaintance with the secrets of all cabals: at times the appointment
to the most important posts of command was decided by a word
from his mistress Praecia. Such a plight was only possible
where none of the men taking part in politics rose above mediocrity:
any man of more than ordinary talent would have swept away
this system of factions like cobwebs; but there was in reality
the saddest lack of men of political or military capacity.
Phillipus
Metellus, Catulus, the Luculli
Of the older generation the civil wars had left not a single man
of repute except the old shrewd and eloquent Lucius Philippus (consul
in 663), who, formerly of popular leanings,(5) thereafter leader
of the capitalist party against the senate,(6) and closely associated
with the Marians,(7) and lastly passing over to the victorious
oligarchy in sufficient time to earn thanks and commendation,(8)
had managed to escape between the parties. Among the men
of the following generation the most notable chiefs of the pure
aristocracy were Quintus Metellus Pius (consul in 674), Sulla's
comrade in dangers and victories; Quintus Lutatius Catulus, consul
in the year of Sulla's death, 676, the son of the victor of Vercellae;
and two younger officers, the brothers Lucius and Marcus Lucullus,
of whom the former had fought with distinction under Sulla
in Asia, the latter in Italy; not to mention Optimates like Quintus
Hortensius (640-704), who had importance only as a pleader,
or men like Decimus Junius Brutus (consul in 677), Mamercus
Aemilius Lepidus Livianus (consul in 677), and other such nullities,
whose best quality was a euphonious aristocratic name.
But even those four men rose little above the average calibre
of the Optimates of this age. Catulus was like his father a man of
refined culture and an honest aristocrat, but of moderate talents
and, in particular, no soldier. Metellus was not merely estimable
in his personal character, but an able and experienced officer;
and it was not so much on account of his close relations as a kinsman
and colleague with the regent as because of his recognized ability
that he was sent in 675, after resigning the consulship, to Spain,
where the Lusitanians and the Roman emigrants under Quintus
Sertorius were bestirring themselves afresh. The two Luculli
were also capable officers--particularly the elder, who combined
very respectable military talents with thorough literary culture
and leanings to authorship, and appeared honourable also as a man.
But, as statesmen, even these better aristocrats were not much less
remiss and shortsighted than the average senators of the time.
In presence of an outward foe the more eminent among them, doubtless,
proved themselves useful and brave; but no one of them evinced
the desire or the skill to solve the problems of politics proper,
and to guide the vessel of the state through the stormy sea of intrigues
and factions as a true pilot. Their political wisdom was limited
to a sincere belief in the oligarchy as the sole means of salvation,
and to a cordial hatred and courageous execration of demagogism
as well as of every individual authority which sought to emancipate
itself. Their petty ambition was contented with little.
The stories told of Metellus in Spain--that he not only allowed
himself to be delighted with the far from harmonious lyre
of the Spanish occasional poets, but even wherever he went had himself
received like a god with libations of wine and odours of incense,
and at table had his head crowned by descending Victories amidst
theatrical thunder with the golden laurel of the conqueror--
are no better attested than most historical anecdotes; but even
such gossip reflects the degenerate ambition of the generations
of Epigoni. Even the better men were content when they had gained
not power and influence, but the consulship and a triumph
and a place of honour in the senate; and at the very time
when with right ambition they would have just begun to be truly useful
to their country and their party, they retired from the political stage
to be lost in princely luxury. Men like Metellus and Lucius Lucullus
were, even as generals, not more attentive to the enlargement
of the Roman dominion by fresh conquests of kings and peoples than
to the enlargement of the endless game, poultry, and dessert lists
of Roman gastronomy by new delicacies from Africa and Asia Minor,
and they wasted the best part of their lives in more or less ingenious
idleness. The traditional aptitude and the individual self-denial,
on which all oligarchic government is based, were lost
in the decayed and artificially restored Roman aristocracy of this age;
in its judgment universally the spirit of clique was accounted
as patriotism, vanity as ambition, and narrow-mindedness as consistency.
Had the Sullan constitution passed into the guardianship of men
such as have sat in the Roman College of Cardinals or the Venetian
Council of Ten, we cannot tell whether the opposition would have been able
to shake it so soon; with such defenders every attack involved,
at all events, a serious peril.
Pompeius
Of the men, who were neither unconditional adherents nor open
opponents of the Sullan constitution, no one attracted more the eyes
of the multitude than the young Gnaeus Pompeius, who was at the time
of Sulla's death twenty-eight years of age (born 29th September 648).
The fact was a misfortune for the admired as well as
for the admirers; but it was natural. Sound in body and mind,
a capable athlete, who even when a superior officer vied with his
soldiers in leaping, running, and lifting, a vigorous and skilled
rider and fencer, a bold leader of volunteer bands, the youth had
become Imperator and triumphator at an age which excluded him
from every magistracy and from the senate, and had acquired
the first place next to Sulla in public opinion; nay, had obtained
from the indulgent regent himself--half in recognition, half in irony--
the surname of the Great. Unhappily, his mental endowments by no means
corresponded with these unprecedented successes. He was neither
a bad nor an incapable man, but a man thoroughly ordinary, created
by nature to be a good sergeant, called by circumstances to be
a general and a statesman. An intelligent, brave and experienced,
thoroughly excellent soldier, he was still, even in his military
capacity, without trace of any higher gifts. It was characteristic
of him as a general, as well as in other respects, to set to work
with a caution bordering on timidity, and, if possible, to give
the decisive blow only when he had established an immense superiority
over his opponent. His culture was the average culture of the time;
although entirely a soldier, he did not neglect, when he went
to Rhodes, dutifully to admire, and to make presents to,
the rhetoricians there. His integrity was that of a rich man
who manages with discretion his considerable property inherited
and acquired. He did not disdain to make money in the usual senatorial
way, but he was too cold and too rich to incur special risks,
or draw down on himself conspicuous disgrace, on that account.
The vice so much in vogue among his contemporaries, rather than
any virtue of his own, procured for him the reputation--comparatively,
no doubt, well warranted--of integrity and disinterestedness.
His "honest countenance" became almost proverbial, and even after
his death he was esteemed as a worthy and moral man; he was in fact
a good neighbour, who did not join in the revolting schemes
by which the grandees of that age extended the bounds of their domains
through forced sales or measures still worse at the expense
of their humbler neighbours, and in domestic life he displayed
attachment to his wife and children: it redounds moreover to his
credit that he was the first to depart from the barbarous custom
of putting to death the captive kings and generals of the enemy,
after they had been exhibited in triumph. But this did not prevent
him from separating from his beloved wife at the command of his lord
and master Sulla, because she belonged to an outlawed family,
nor from ordering with great composure that men who had stood
by him and helped him in times of difficulty should be executed
before his eyes at the nod of the same master:(9) he was not cruel,
thoughhe was reproached with being so, but--what perhaps was worse--
he was cold and, in good as in evil, unimpassioned. In the tumult
of battle he faced the enemy fearlessly; in civil life he was a shy
man, whose cheek flushed on the slightest occasion; he spoke
in public not without embarrassment, and generally was angular, stiff,
and awkward in intercourse. With all his haughty obstinacy he was--
as indeed persons ordinarily are, who make a display of their
independence--a pliant tool in the hands of men who knew how
to manage him, especially of his freedmen and clients, by whom he had
no fear of being controlled. For nothing was he less qualified
than for a statesman. Uncertain as to his aims, unskilful in the choice
of his means, alike in little and great matters shortsighted
and helpless, he was wont to conceal his irresolution and indecision
under a solemn silence, and, when he thought to play a subtle
game, simply to deceive himself with the belief that he was
deceiving others. By his military position and his territorial
connections he acquired almost without any action of his own
a considerable party personally devoted to him, with which
the greatest things might have been accomplished; but Pompeius
was in every respect incapable of leading and keeping together a party,
and, if it still kept together, it did so--in like manner without
his action--through the sheer force of circumstances. In this,
as in other things, he reminds us of Marius; but Marius, with his
nature of boorish roughness and sensuous passion, was still less
intolerable than this most tiresome and most starched of all
artificial great men. His political position was utterly perverse.
He was a Sullan officer and under obligation to stand up for
the restored constitution, and yet again in opposition to Sulla
personally as well as to the whole senatorial government. The gens
of the Pompeii, which had only been named for some sixty years
in the consular lists, had by no means acquired full standing
in the eyes of the aristocracy; even the father of this Pompeius
had occupied a very invidious equivocal position towards
the senate,(10) and he himself had once been in the ranks
of the Cinnans(11)--recollections which were suppressed perhaps,
but not forgotten. The prominent position which Pompeius
acquired for himself under Sulla set him at inward variance
with the aristocracy, quite as much as it brought him into outward
connection with it. Weak-headed as he was, Pompeius was seized
with giddiness on the height of glory which he had climbed
with such dangerous rapidity and ease. Just as if he would himself
ridicule his dry prosaic nature by the parallel with the most
poetical of all heroic figures, he began to compare himself
with Alexander the Great, and to account himself a man of unique
standing, whom it did not beseem to be merely one of the five
hundred senators of Rome. In reality, no one was more fitted
to take his place as a member of an aristocratic government than
Pompeius. His dignified outward appearance, his solemn formality,
his personal bravery, his decorous private life, his want
of all initiative might have gained for him, had he been born
two hundred years earlier, an honourable place by the side
of Quintus Maximus and Publius Decius: this mediocrity, so characteristic
of the genuine Optimate and the genuine Roman, contributed not a little
to the elective affinity which subsisted at all times between Pompeius
and the mass of the burgesses and the senate. Even in his own age
he would have had a clearly defined and respectable position
had he contented himself with being the general of the senate,
for which he was from the outset destined. With this he was
not content, and so he fell into the fatal plight of wishing
to be something else than he could be. He was constantly aspiring
to a special position in the state, and, when it offered itself,
he could not make up his mind to occupy it; he was deeply indignant
when persons and laws did not bend unconditionally before him,
and yet he everywhere bore himself with no mere affectation
of modesty as one of many peers, and trembled at the mere thought
of undertaking anything unconstitutional. Thus constantly
at fundamental variance with, and yet at the same time the obedient
servant of, the oligarchy, constantly tormented by an ambition
which was frightened at its own aims, his much-agitated life
passed joylessly away in a perpetual inward contradiction.