The History of Rome, Book II

Officers—

Military Discipline—

Training and Classes of Soldiers—

Military Value of the Manipular Legion

A complete revolution occurred during this epoch in the military system. The primitive Graeco-Italian military organization, which was probably based, like the Homeric, on the selection of the most distinguished and effective warriors—who ordinarily fought on horseback—to form a special vanguard, had in the later regal period been superseded by the -legio—the old Dorian phalanx of hoplites, probably eight file deep.[156 - I. VI. Organization of the Army] This phalanx thenceforth undertook the chief burden of the battle, while the cavalry were stationed on the flanks, and, mounted or dismounted according to circumstances, were chiefly employed as a reserve. From this arrangement there were developed nearly at the same time the phalanx of -sarrissae-in Macedonia and the manipular arrangement in Italy, the former formed by closing and deepening, the latter by breaking up and multiplying, the ranks, in the first instance by the division of the old -legio- of 8400 into two -legiones- of 4200 men each. The old Doric phalanx had been wholly adapted to close combat with the sword and especially with the spear, and only an accessory and subordinate position in the order of battle was assigned to missile weapons. In the manipular legion the thrusting-lance was confined to the third division, and instead of it the first two were furnished with a new and peculiar Italian missile weapon, the -pilum- a square or round piece of wood, four and a half feet long, with a triangular or quadrangular iron point—which had been originally perhaps invented for the defence of the ramparts of the camp, but was soon transferred from the rear to the front ranks, and was hurled by the advancing line into the ranks of the enemy at a distance of from ten to twenty paces. At the same time the sword acquired far greater importance than the short knife of the phalangite could ever have had; for the volley of javelins was intended in the first instance merely to prepare the way for an attack sword in hand. While, moreover, the phalanx had, as if it were a single mighty lance, to be hurled at once upon the enemy, in the new Italian legion the smaller units, which existed also in the phalanx system but were in the order of battle firmly and indissolubly united, were tactically separated from each other. Not merely was the close square divided, as we have said, into two equally strong halves, but each of these was separated in the direction of its depth into the three divisions of the -hastati-, – principes-, and -triarii-, each of a moderate depth probably amounting in ordinary cases to only four files; and was broken up along the front into ten bands (-manipuli-), in such a way that between every two divisions and every two maniples there was left a perceptible interval. It was a mere continuation of the same process of individualizing, by which the collective mode of fighting was discouraged even in the diminished tactical unit and the single combat became prominent, as is evident from the (already mentioned) decisive part played by hand-to-hand encounters and combats with the sword. The system of entrenching the camp underwent also a peculiar development. The place where the army encamped, even were it only for a single night, was invariably provided with a regular circumvallation and as it were converted into a fortress. Little change took place on the other hand in the cavalry, which in the manipular legion retained the secondary part which it had occupied by the side of the phalanx. The system of officering the army also continued in the main unchanged; only now over each of the two legions of the regular army there were set just as many war-tribunes as had hitherto commanded the whole army, and the number of staff-officers was thus doubled. It was at this period probably that the clear line of demarcation became established between the subaltern officers, who as common soldiers had to gain their place at the head of the maniples by the sword and passed by regular promotion from the lower to the higher maniples, and the military tribunes placed at the head of whole legions—six to each—in whose case there was no regular promotion, and for whom men of the better class were usually taken. In this respect it must have become a matter of importance that, while previously the subaltern as well as the staff-officers had been uniformly nominated by the general, after 392 some of the latter posts were filled up through election by the burgesses.[157 - II. III. Increasing Powers of the Burgesses] Lastly, the old, fearfully strict, military discipline remained unaltered. Still, as formerly, the general was at liberty to behead any man serving in his camp, and to scourge with rods the staff-officer as well as the common soldier; nor were such punishments inflicted merely on account of common crimes, but also when an officer had allowed himself to deviate from the orders which he had received, or when a division had allowed itself to be surprised or had fled from the field of battle. On the other hand, the new military organization necessitated a far more serious and prolonged military training than the previous phalanx system, in which the solidity of the mass kept even the inexperienced in their ranks. If nevertheless no special soldier-class sprang up, but on the contrary the army still remained, as before, a burgess army, this object was chiefly attained by abandoning the former mode of ranking the soldiers according to property[158 - I. VI. the Five Classes] and arranging them according to length of service. The Roman recruit now entered among the light-armed "skirmishers" (-rorarii-), who fought outside of the line and especially with stone slings, and he advanced from this step by step to the first and then to the second division, till at length the soldiers of long service and experience were associated together in the corps of the -triarii-, which was numerically the weakest but imparted its tone and spirit to the whole army.

The excellence of this military organization, which became the primary cause of the superior political position of the Roman community, chiefly depended on the three great military principles of maintaining a reserve, of combining the close and distant modes of fighting, and of combining the offensive and the defensive. The system of a reserve was already foreshadowed in the earlier employment of the cavalry, but it was now completely developed by the partition of the army into three divisions and the reservation of the flower of the veterans for the last and decisive shock. While the Hellenic phalanx had developed the close, and the Oriental squadrons of horse armed with bows and light missile spears the distant, modes of fighting respectively, the Roman combination of the heavy javelin with the sword produced results similar, as has justly been remarked, to those attained in modern warfare by the introduction of bayonet-muskets; the volley of javelins prepared the way for the sword encounter, exactly in the same way as a volley of musketry now precedes a charge with the bayonet. Lastly, the elaborate system of encampment allowed the Romans to combine the advantages of defensive and offensive war and to decline or give battle according to circumstances, and in the latter case to fight under the ramparts of their camp just as under the walls of a fortress—the Roman, says a Roman proverb, conquers by sitting still.

Origin of the Manipular Legion

That this new military organization was in the main a Roman, or at any rate Italian, remodelling and improvement of the old Hellenic tactics of the phalanx, is plain. If some germs of the system of reserve and of the individualizing of the smaller subdivisions of the army are found to occur among the later Greek strategists, especially Xenophon, this only shows that they felt the defectiveness of the old system, but were not well able to obviate it. The manipular legion appears fully developed in the war with Pyrrhus; when and under what circumstances it arose, whether at once or gradually, can no longer be ascertained. The first tactical system which the Romans encountered, fundamentally different from the earlier Italo-Hellenic system, was the Celtic sword-phalanx. It is not impossible that the subdivision of the army and the intervals between the maniples in front were arranged with a view to resist, as they did resist, its first and only dangerous charge; and it accords with this hypothesis that Marcus Furius Camillus, the most celebrated Roman general of the Gallic epoch, is presented in various detached notices as the reformer of the Roman military system. The further traditions associated with the Samnite and Pyrrhic wars are neither sufficiently accredited, nor can they with certainty be duly arranged;[159 - According to Roman tradition the Romans originally carried quadrangular shields, after which they borrowed from the Etruscans the round hoplite shield (-clupeus-, —aspis—), and from the Samnites the later square shield (-scutum-, —thureos—), and the javelin (-veru-) (Diodor. Vat. Fr. p. 54; Sallust, Cat. 51, 38; Virgil, Aen. vii. 665; Festus, Ep. v. Samnites, p. 327, Mull.; and the authorities cited in Marquardt, Handb. iii. 2, 241). But it may be regarded as certain that the hoplite shield or, in other words, the tactics of the Doric phalanx were imitated not from the Etruscans, but directly from the Hellenes, As to the -scutum-, that large, cylindrical, convex leather shield must certainly have taken the place of the flat copper -clupeus-, when the phalanx was broken up into maniples; but the undoubted derivation of the word from the Greek casts suspicion on the derivation of the thing itself from the Samnites. From the Greeks the Romans derived also the sling (-funda- from —sphendone—). (like -fides- from —sphion—),(I. XV. Earliest Hellenic Influences). The pilum was considered by the ancients as quite a Roman invention.] although it is in itself probable that the prolonged Samnite mountain warfare exercised a lasting influence on the individual development of the Roman soldier, and that the struggle with one of the first masters of the art of war, belonging to the school of the great Alexander, effected an improvement in the technical features of the Roman military system.

National Economy—

The Farmers—

Farming of Estates

In the national economy agriculture was, and continued to be, the social and political basis both of the Roman community and of the new Italian state. The common assembly and the army consisted of Roman farmers; what as soldiers they had acquired by the sword, they secured as colonists by the plough. The insolvency of the middle class of landholders gave rise to the formidable internal crises of the third and fourth centuries, amidst which it seemed as if the young republic could not but be destroyed. The revival of the Latin farmer-class, which was produced during the fifth century partly by the large assignations of land and incorporations, partly by the fall in the rate of interest and the increase of the Roman population, was at once the effect and the cause of the mighty development of Roman power. The acute soldier's eye of Pyrrhus justly discerned the cause of the political and military ascendency of the Romans in the flourishing condition of the Roman farms. But the rise also of husbandry on a large scale among the Romans appears to fall within this period. In earlier times indeed there existed landed estates of—at least comparatively—large size; but their management was not farming on a large scale, it was simply a husbandry of numerous small parcels.[160 - I. XIII. Landed Proprietors] On the other hand the enactment in the law of 387, not incompatible indeed with the earlier mode of management but yet far more appropriate to the later, viz. that the landholder should be bound to employ along with his slaves a proportional number of free persons,[161 - II. III. Combination of the Plebian Aristocracy and the Farmers against the Nobility] may well be regarded as the oldest trace of the later centralized farming of estates;[162 - Varro (De R. R. i. 2, 9) evidently conceives the author of the Licinian agrarian law as fanning in person his extensive lands; although, we may add, the story may easily have been invented to explain the cognomen (-Stolo-).] and it deserves notice that even here at its first emergence it essentially rests on slave-holding. How it arose, must remain an undecided point; possibly the Carthaginian plantations in Sicily served as models to the oldest Roman landholders, and perhaps even the appearance of wheat in husbandry by the side of spelt,[163 - I. XIII. System of Joint Cultivation] which Varro places about the period of the decemvirs, was connected with that altered style of management. Still less can we ascertain how far this method of husbandry had already during this period spread; but the history of the wars with Hannibal leaves no doubt that it cannot yet have become the rule, nor can it have yet absorbed the Italian farmer class. Where it did come into vogue, however, it annihilated the older clientship based on the -precarium-; just as the modern system of large farms has been formed in great part by the suppression of petty holdings and the conversion of hides into farm-fields. It admits of no doubt that the restriction of this agricultural clientship very materially contributed towards the distress of the class of small cultivators.

Inland Intercourse in Italy

Respecting the internal intercourse of the Italians with each other our written authorities are silent; coins alone furnish some information. We have already mentioned[164 - I. XIII. Inland Commerce of the Italians] that in Italy, with the exception of the Greek cities and of the Etruscan Populonia, there was no coinage during the first three centuries of Rome, and that cattle in the first instance, and subsequently copper by weight, served as the medium of exchange. Within the present epoch occurred the transition on the part of the Italians from the system of barter to that of money; and in their money they were naturally led at first to Greek models. The circumstances of central Italy led however to the adoption of copper instead of silver as the metal for their coinage, and the unit of coinage was primarily based on the previous unit of value, the copper pound; hence they cast their coins instead of stamping them, for no die would have sufficed for pieces so large and heavy. Yet there seems from the first to have been a fixed ratio for the relative value of copper and silver (250:1), and with reference to that ratio the copper coinage seems to have been issued; so that, for example, in Rome the large copper piece, the -as-, was equal in value to a scruple (1/288 of a pound) of silver. It is a circumstance historically more remarkable, that coining in Italy most probably originated in Rome, and in fact with the decemvirs, who found in the Solonian legislation a pattern for the regulation of their coinage; and that from Rome it spread over a number of Latin, Etruscan, Umbrian, and east-Italian communities, —a clear proof of the superior position which Rome from the beginning of the fourth century held in Italy. As all these communities subsisted side by side in formal independence, legally the monetary standard was entirely local, and the territory of every city had its own monetary system. Nevertheless the standards of copper coinage in central and northern Italy may be comprehended in three groups, within which the coins in common intercourse seem to have been treated as homogeneous. These groups are, first, the coins of the cities of Etruria lying north of the Ciminian Forest and those of Umbria; secondly, the coins of Rome and Latium; and lastly, those of the eastern seaboard. We have already observed that the Roman coins held a certain ratio to silver by weight; on the other hand we find those of the east coast of Italy placed in a definite proportional relation to the silver coins which were current from an early period in southern Italy, and the standard of which was adopted by the Italian immigrants, such as the Bruttians, Lucanians, and Nolans, by the Latin colonies in that quarter, such as Cales and Suessa, and even by the Romans themselves for their possessions in Lower Italy. Accordingly the inland traffic of Italy must have been divided into corresponding provinces, which dealt with one another like foreign nations.

In transmarine commerce the relations we have previously described[165 - I. XIII. Commerce in Latium Passive, in Etruria Active] between Sicily and Latium, Etruria and Attica, the Adriatic and Tarentum, continued to subsist during the epoch before us or rather, strictly speaking, belonged to it; for although facts of this class, which as a rule are mentioned without a date, have been placed together for the purpose of presenting a general view under the first period, the statements made apply equally to the present. The clearest evidence in this respect is, of course, that of the coins. As the striking of Etruscan silver money after an Attic standard[166 - I. XIII. Etrusco-Attic, and Latino-Sicilian Commerce] and the penetrating of Italian and especially of Latin copper into Sicily[167 - I. XIII. Etrusco-Attic, and Latino-Sicilian Commerce] testify to the two former routes of traffic, so the equivalence, which we have just mentioned, between the silver money of Magna Graecia and the copper coinage of Picenum and Apulia, forms, with numerous other indications, an evidence of the active traffic which the Greeks of Lower Italy, the Tarentines in particular, held with the east Italian seaboard. The commerce again, which was at an earlier period perhaps still more active, between the Latins and the Campanian Greeks seems to have been disturbed by the Sabellian immigration, and to have been of no great moment during the first hundred and fifty years of the republic. The refusal of the Samnites in Capua and Cumae to supply the Romans with grain in the famine of 343 may be regarded as an indication of the altered relations which subsisted between Latium and Campania, till at the commencement of the fifth century the Roman arms restored and gave increased impetus to the old intercourse.

Touching on details, we may be allowed to mention, as one of the few dated facts in the history of Roman commerce, the notice drawn from the annals of Ardea, that in 454 the first barber came from Sicily to Ardea; and to dwell for a moment on the painted pottery which was sent chiefly from Attica, but also from Corcyra and Sicily, to Lucania, Campania, and Etruria, to serve there for the decoration of tombs—a traffic, as to the circumstances of which we are accidentally better informed than as to any other article of transmarine commerce. The commencement of this import trade probably falls about the period of the expulsion of the Tarquins; for the vases of the oldest style, which are of very rare occurrence in Italy, were probably painted in the second half of the third century of the city, while those of the chaste style, occurring in greater numbers, belong to the first half, those of the most finished beauty to the second half, of the fourth century; and the immense quantities of the other vases, often marked by showiness and size but seldom by excellence in workmanship, must be assigned as a whole to the following century. It was from the Hellenes undoubtedly that the Italians derived this custom of embellishing tombs; but while the moderate means and fine discernment of the Greeks confined the practice in their case within narrow limits, it was stretched in Italy by barbaric opulence and barbaric extravagance far beyond its original and proper bounds. It is a significant circumstance, however, that in Italy this extravagance meets us only in the lands that had a Hellenic semi-culture. Any one who can read such records will perceive in the cemeteries of Etruria and Campania —the mines whence our museums have been replenished—a significant commentary on the accounts of the ancients as to the Etruscan and Campanian semi-culture choked amidst wealth and arrogance.[168 - II. IV. Etruria at Peace and on the Decline, II. V. Campanian Hellenism] The homely Samnite character on the other hand remained at all times a stranger to this foolish luxury; the absence of Greek pottery from the tombs exhibits, quite as palpably as the absence of a Samnite coinage, the slight development of commercial intercourse and of urban life in this region. It is still more worthy of remark that Latium also, although not less near to the Greeks than Etruria and Campania, and in closest intercourse with them, almost wholly refrained from such sepulchral decorations. It is more than probable—especially on account of the altogether different character of the tombs in the unique Praeneste—that in this result we have to recognize the influence of the stern Roman morality or—if the expression be preferred—of the rigid Roman police. Closely connected with this subject are the already-mentioned interdicts, which the law of the Twelve Tables fulminated against purple bier-cloths and gold ornaments placed beside the dead; and the banishment of all silver plate, excepting the salt-cellar and sacrificial ladle, from the Roman household, so far at least as sumptuary laws and the terror of censorial censure could banish it: even in architecture we shall again encounter the same spirit of hostility to luxury whether noble or ignoble. Although, however, in consequence of these influences Rome probably preserved a certain outward simplicity longer than Capua and Volsinii, her commerce and trade—on which, in fact, along with agriculture her prosperity from the beginning rested—must not be regarded as having been inconsiderable, or as having less sensibly experienced the influence of her new commanding position.

Capital in Rome

No urban middle class in the proper sense of that term, no body of independent tradesmen and merchants, was ever developed in Rome. The cause of this was—in addition to the disproportionate centralization of capital which occurred at an early period—mainly the employment of slave labour. It was usual in antiquity, and was in fact a necessary consequence of slavery, that the minor trades in towns were very frequently carried on by slaves, whom their master established as artisans or merchants; or by freedmen, in whose case the master not only frequently furnished the capital, but also regularly stipulated for a share, often the half, of the profits. Retail trading and dealing in Rome were undoubtedly constantly on the increase; and there are proofs that the trades which minister to the luxury of great cities began to be concentrated in Rome—the Ficoroni casket for instance was designed in the fifth century of the city by a Praenestine artist and was sold to Praeneste, but was nevertheless manufactured in Rome.[169 - The conjecture that Novius Flautius, the artist who worked at this casket for Dindia Macolnia, in Rome, may have been a Campanian, is refuted by the old Praenestine tomb-stones recently discovered, on which, among other Macolnii and Plautii, there occurs also a Lucius Magulnius, son of Haulms (L. Magolnio Pla. f.).] But as the net proceeds even of retail business flowed for the most part into the coffers of the great houses, no industrial and commercial middle-class arose to an extent corresponding to that increase. As little were the great merchants and great manufacturers marked off as a distinct class from the great landlords. On the one hand, the latter were from ancient times[170 - I. XIII. Etrusco-Attic, and Latino-Sicilian Commerce, II. II. Rising Power of the Capitalists] simultaneously traders and capitalists, and combined in their hands lending on security, trafficking on a great scale, the undertaking of contracts, and the executing of works for the state. On the other hand, from the emphatic moral importance which in the Roman commonwealth attached to the possession of land, and from its constituting the sole basis of political privileges—a basis which was infringed for the first time only towards the close of this epoch [171 - II. III. The Burgess Body]—it was undoubtedly at this period already usual for the fortunate speculator to invest part of his capital in land. It is clear enough also from the political privileges given to freedmen possessing freeholds,[172 - II. III. The Burgess Body] that the Roman statesmen sought in this way to diminish the dangerous class of the rich who had no land.

Development of Rome as A Great City

But while neither an opulent urban middle class nor a strictly close body of capitalists grew up in Rome, it was constantly acquiring more and more the character of a great city. This is plainly indicated by the increasing number of slaves crowded together in the capital (as attested by the very serious slave conspiracy of 335), and still more by the increasing multitude of freedmen, which was gradually becoming inconvenient and dangerous, as we may safely infer from the considerable tax imposed on manumissions in 397[173 - II. III. Laws Imposing Taxes] and from the limitation of the political rights of freedmen in 450.[174 - II. III. The Burgess Body] For not only was it implied in the circumstances that the great majority of the persons manumitted had to devote themselves to trade or commerce, but manumission itself among the Romans was, as we have already said, less an act of liberality than an industrial speculation, the master often finding it more for his interest to share the profits of the trade or commerce of the freedman than to assert his title to the whole proceeds of the labour of his slave. The increase of manumissions must therefore have necessarily kept pace with the increase of the commercial and industrial activity of the Romans.

Urban Police

A similar indication of the rising importance of urban life in Rome is presented by the great development of the urban police. To this period probably belong in great measure the enactments under which the four aediles divided the city into four police districts, and made provision for the discharge of their equally important and difficult functions—for the efficient repair of the network of drains small and large by which Rome was pervaded, as well as of the public buildings and places; for the proper cleansing and paving of the streets; for obviating the nuisances of ruinous buildings, dangerous animals, or foul smells; for the removing of waggons from the highway except during the hours of evening and night, and generally for the keeping open of the communication; for the uninterrupted supply of the market of the capital with good and cheap grain; for the destruction of unwholesome articles, and the suppression of false weights and measures; and for the special oversight of baths, taverns, and houses of bad fame.

Building—

Impulse Given to It

In respect to buildings the regal period, particularly the epoch of the great conquests, probably accomplished more than the first two centuries of the republic. Structures like the temples on the Capitol and on the Aventine and the great Circus were probably as obnoxious to the frugal fathers of the city as to the burgesses who gave their task-work; and it is remarkable that perhaps the most considerable building of the republican period before the Samnite wars, the temple of Ceres in the Circus, was a work of Spurius Cassius (261) who in more than one respect, sought to lead the commonwealth back to the traditions of the kings. The governing aristocracy moreover repressed private luxury with a rigour such as the rule of the kings, if prolonged, would certainly not have displayed. But at length even the senate was no longer able to resist the superior force of circumstances. It was Appius Claudius who in his epoch-making censorship (442) threw aside the antiquated rustic system of parsimonious hoarding, and taught his fellow-citizens to make a worthy use of the public resources. He began that noble system of public works of general utility, which justifies, if anything can justify, the military successes of Rome even from the point of view of the welfare of the nations, and which even now in its ruins furnishes some idea of the greatness of Rome to thousands on thousands who have never read a page of her history. To him the Roman state was indebted for its great military road, and the city of Rome for its first aqueduct. Following in the steps of Claudius, the Roman senate wove around Italy that network of roads and fortresses, the formation of which has already been described,[175 - II. VII. Construction of New Fortresses and Roads] and without which, as the history of all military states from the Achaemenidae down to the creator of the road over the Simplon shows, no military hegemony can subsist. Following in the steps of Claudius, Manius Curius built from the proceeds of the Pyrrhic spoil a second aqueduct for the capital (482); and some years previously (464) with the gains of the Sabine war he opened up for the Velino, at the point above Terni where it falls into the Nera, that broader channel in which the stream still flows, with a view to drain the beautiful valley of Rieti and thereby to gain space for a large burgess settlement along with a modest farm for himself. Such works, in the eyes of persons of intelligence, threw into the shade the aimless magnificence of the Hellenic temples.

Embellishment of the City

The style of living also among the citizens now was altered. About the time of Pyrrhus silver plate began to make its appearance on Roman tables, and the chroniclers date the disappearance of shingle roofs in Rome from 470.[176 - We have already mentioned the censorial stigma attached to Publius Cornelius Rufinus (consul 464, 477) for his silver plate.(II. VIII. Police) The strange statement of Fabius (in Strabo, v. p. 228) that the Romans first became given to luxury (—aisthesthae tou plouton—) after the conquest of the Sabines, is evidently only a historical version of the same matter; for the conquest of the Sabines falls in the first consulate of Rufinus.] The new capital of Italy gradually laid aside its village-like aspect, and now began to embellish itself. It was not yet indeed customary to strip the temples in conquered towns of their ornaments for the decoration of Rome; but the beaks of the galleys of Antium were displayed at the orator's platform in the Forum[177 - II. V. Colonizations in the Land of the Volsci] and on public festival days the gold-mounted shields brought home from the battle-fields of Samnium were exhibited along the stalls of the market.[178 - II. VI. Last Campaigns in Samnium] The proceeds of fines were specially applied to the paving of the highways in and near the city, or to the erection and embellishment of public buildings. The wooden booths of the butchers, which stretched along the Forum on both sides, gave way, first on the Palatine side, then on that also which faced the Carinae, to the stone stalls of the money-changers; so that this place became the Exchange of Rome. Statues of the famous men of the past, of the kings, priests, and heroes of the legendary period, and of the Grecian -hospes- who was said to have interpreted to the decemvirs the laws of Solon; honorary columns and monuments dedicated to the great burgomasters who had conquered the Veientes, the Latins, the Samnites, to state envoys who had perished while executing their instructions, to rich women who had bequeathed their property to public objects, nay even to celebrated Greek philosophers and heroes such as Pythagoras and Alcibiades, were erected on the Capitol or in the Forum. Thus, now that the Roman community had become a great power, Rome itself became a great city.

Silver Standard of Value

Lastly Rome, as head of the Romano-Italian confederacy, not only entered into the Hellenistic state-system, but also conformed to the Hellenic system of moneys and coins. Up to this time the different communities of northern and central Italy, with few exceptions, had struck only a copper currency; the south Italian towns again universally had a currency of silver; and there were as many legal standards and systems of coinage as there were sovereign communities in Italy. In 485 all these local mints were restricted to the issuing of small coin; a general standard of currency applicable to all Italy was introduced, and the coining of the currency was centralized in Rome; Capua alone continued to retain its own silver coinage struck in the name of Rome, but after a different standard. The new monetary system was based on the legal ratio subsisting between the two metals, as it had long been fixed.[179 - II. VIII. Inland Intercourse in Italy] The common monetary unit was the piece of ten -asses- (which were no longer of a pound, but reduced to the third of a pound), the -denarius-, which weighed in copper 3 1/3 and in silver 1/72, of a Roman pound, a trifle more than the Attic —drachma—. At first copper money still predominated in the coinage; and it is probable that the earliest silver -denarius- was coined chiefly for Lower Italy and for intercourse with other lands. As the victory of the Romans over Pyrrhus and Tarentum and the Roman embassy to Alexandria could not but engage the thoughts of the contemporary Greek statesman, so the sagacious Greek merchant might well ponder as he looked on these new Roman drachmae. Their flat, unartistic, and monotonous stamping appeared poor and insignificant by the side of the marvellously beautiful contemporary coins of Pyrrhus and the Siceliots; nevertheless they were by no means, like the barbarian coins of antiquity, slavishly imitated and unequal in weight and alloy, but, on the contrary, worthy from the first by their independent and conscientious execution to be placed on a level with any Greek coin.

Extension of the Latin Nationality

Thus, when the eye turns from the development of constitutions and from the national struggles for dominion and for freedom which agitated Italy, and Rome in particular, from the banishment of the Tarquinian house to the subjugation of the Samnites and the Italian Greeks, and rests on those calmer spheres of human existence which history nevertheless rules and pervades, it everywhere encounters the reflex influence of the great events, by which the Roman burgesses burst the bonds of patrician sway, and the rich variety of the national cultures of Italy gradually perished to enrich a single people. While the historian may not attempt to follow out the great course of events into the infinite multiplicity of individual detail, he does not overstep his province when, laying hold of detached fragments of scattered tradition, he indicates the most important changes which during this epoch took place in the national life of Italy. That in such an inquiry the life of Rome becomes still more prominent than in the earlier epoch, is not merely the result of the accidental blanks of our tradition; it was an essential consequence of the change in the political position of Rome, that the Latin nationality should more and more cast the other nationalities of Italy into the shade. We have already pointed to the fact, that at this epoch the neighbouring lands—southern Etruria, Sabina, the land of the Volscians, —began to become Romanized, as is attested by the almost total absence of monuments of the old native dialects, and by the occurrence of very ancient Roman inscriptions in those regions; the admission of the Sabines to full burgess-rights at the end of this period[180 - I. III. Localities of the Oldest Cantons] betokens that the Latinizing of Central Italy was already at that time the conscious aim of Roman policy. The numerous individual assignations and colonial establishments scattered throughout Italy were, not only in a military but also in a linguistic and national point of view, the advanced posts of the Latin stock. The Latinizing of the Italians was scarcely at this time generally aimed at; on the contrary, the Roman senate seems to have intentionally upheld the distinction between the Latin and the other nationalities, and they did not yet, for example, allow the introduction of Latin into official use among the half-burgess communities of Campania. The force of circumstances, however, is stronger than even the strongest government: the language and customs of the Latin people immediately shared its predominance in Italy, and already began to undermine the other Italian nationalities.

Progress of Hellenism in Italy—

Adoption of Greek Habits at the Table

These nationalities were at the same time assailed from another quarter and by an ascendency resting on another basis—by Hellenism. This was the period when Hellenism began to become conscious of its intellectual superiority to the other nations, and to diffuse itself on every side. Italy did not remain unaffected by it. The most remarkable phenomenon of this sort is presented by Apulia, which after the fifth century of Rome gradually laid aside its barbarian dialect and silently became Hellenized. This change was brought about, as in Macedonia and Epirus, not by colonization, but by civilization, which seems to have gone hand in hand with the land commerce of Tarentum; at least that hypothesis is favoured by the facts, that the districts of the Poediculi and Daunii who were on friendly terms with the Tarentines carried out their Hellenization more completely than the Sallentines who lived nearer to Tarentum but were constantly at feud with it, and that the towns that were soonest Graecized, such as Arpi, were not situated on the coast. The stronger influence exerted by Hellenism over Apulia than over any other Italian region is explained partly by its position, partly by the slight development of any national culture of its own, and partly also perhaps by its nationality presenting a character less alien to the Greek stock than that of the rest of Italy.[181 - I. II. Iapygians] We have already called attention[182 - II. V. Campanian Hellenism] to the fact that the southern Sabellian stocks, although at the outset in concert with the tyrants of Syracuse they crushed and destroyed the Hellenism of Magna Graecia, were at the same time affected by contact and mingling with the Greeks, so that some of them, such as the Bruttians and Nolans, adopted the Greek language by the side of their native tongue, and others, such as the Lucanians and a part of the Campanians, adopted at least Greek writing and Greek manners. Etruria likewise showed tendencies towards a kindred development in the remarkable vases which have been discovered[183 - II. VIII. Transmarine Commerce] belonging to this period, rivalling those of Campania and Lucania; and though Latium and Samnium remained more strangers to Hellenism, there were not wanting there also traces of an incipient and ever-growing influence of Greek culture. In all branches of the development of Rome during this epoch, in legislation and coinage, in religion, in the formation of national legend, we encounter traces of the Greeks; and from the commencement of the fifth century in particular, in other words, after the conquest of Campania, the Greek influence on Roman life appears rapidly and constantly on the increase. In the fourth century occurred the erection of the "-Graecostasis-"—remarkable in the very form of the word—a platform in the Roman Forum for eminent Greek strangers and primarily for the Massiliots.[184 - II. VII. The Full Roman Franchise] In the following century the annals began to exhibit Romans of quality with Greek surnames, such as Philipus or in Roman form Pilipus, Philo, Sophus, Hypsaeus. Greek customs gained ground: such as the non-Italian practice of placing inscriptions in honour of the dead on the tomb—of which the epitaph of Lucius Scipio (consul in 456) is the oldest example known to us; the fashion, also foreign to the Italians, of erecting without any decree of the state honorary monuments to ancestors in public places —a system begun by the great innovator Appius Claudius, when he caused bronze shields with images and eulogies of his ancestors to be suspended in the new temple of Bellona (442); the distribution of branches of palms to the competitors, introduced at the Roman national festival in 461; above all, the Greek manners and habits at table. The custom not of sitting as formerly on benches, but of reclining on sofas, at table; the postponement of the chief meal from noon to between two and three o'clock in the afternoon according to our mode of reckoning; the institution of masters of the revels at banquets, who were appointed from among the guests present, generally by throwing the dice, and who then prescribed to the company what, how, and when they should drink; the table-chants sung in succession by the guests, which, however, in Rome were not -scolia-, but lays in praise of ancestors—all these were not primitive customs in Rome, but were borrowed from the Greeks at a very early period, for in Cato's time these usages were already common and had in fact partly fallen into disuse again. We must therefore place their introduction in this period at the latest. A characteristic feature also was the erection of statues to "the wisest and the bravest Greek" in the Roman Forum, which took place by command of the Pythian Apollo during the Samnite wars. The selection fell—evidently under Sicilian or Campanian influence—on Pythagoras and Alcibiades, the saviour and the Hannibal of the western Hellenes. The extent to which an acquaintance with Greek was already diffused in the fifth century among Romans of quality is shown by the embassies of the Romans to Tarentum—when their mouthpiece spoke, if not in the purest Greek, at any rate without an interpreter—and of Cineas to Rome. It scarcely admits of a doubt that from the fifth century the young Romans who devoted themselves to state affairs universally acquired a knowledge of what was then the general language of the world and of diplomacy.

Thus in the intellectual sphere Hellenism made advances quite as incessant as the efforts of the Romans to subject the earth to their sway; and the secondary nationalities, such as the Samnite, Celt, and Etruscan, hard pressed on both sides, were ever losing their inward vigour as well as narrowing their outward bounds.

Rome and the Romans of This Epoch

When the two great nations, both arrived at the height of their development, began to mingle in hostile or in friendly contact, their antagonism of character was at the same time prominently and fully brought out—the total want of individuality in the Italian and especially in the Roman character, as contrasted with the boundless variety, lineal, local, and personal, of Hellenism. There was no epoch of mightier vigour in the history of Rome than the epoch from the institution of the republic to the subjugation of Italy. That epoch laid the foundations of the commonwealth both within and without; it created a united Italy; it gave birth to the traditional groundwork of the national law and of the national history; it originated the -pilum- and the maniple, the construction of roads and of aqueducts, the farming of estates and the monetary system; it moulded the she-wolf of the Capitol and designed the Ficoroni casket. But the individuals, who contributed the several stones to this gigantic structure and cemented them together, have disappeared without leaving a trace, and the nations of Italy did not merge into that of Rome more completely than the single Roman burgess merged in the Roman community. As the grave closes alike over all whether important or insignificant, so in the roll of the Roman burgomasters the empty scion of nobility stands undistinguishable by the side of the great statesman. Of the few records that have reached us from this period none is more venerable, and none at the same time more characteristic, than the epitaph of Lucius Cornelius Scipio, who was consul in 456, and three years afterwards took part in the decisive battle of Sentinum.[185 - II. VI. Battle of Sentinum] On the beautiful sarcophagus, in noble Doric style, which eighty years ago still enclosed the dust of the conqueror of the Samnites, the following sentence is inscribed:—

-Cornelius Lucius—Scipio Barbatus,
Gnaivod patre prognatus, —fortis vir sapiensque,
Quoius forma virtu—tei parisuma fuit,
Consol censor aidilis—quei fuit apud vos,
Taurasia Cisauna—Samnio cepit,
Subigit omne Loucanum—opsidesque abdoucit.-

-'-'-'||-'-'-'_

Innumerable others who had been at the head of the Roman commonwealth, as well as this Roman statesman and warrior, might be commemorated as having been of noble birth and of manly beauty, valiant and wise; but there was no more to record regarding them. It is doubtless not the mere fault of tradition that no one of these Cornelii, Fabii, Papirii, or whatever they were called, confronts us in a distinct individual figure. The senator was supposed to be no worse and no better than other senators, nor at all to differ from them. It was not necessary and not desirable that any burgess should surpass the rest, whether by showy silver plate and Hellenic culture, or by uncommon wisdom and excellence. Excesses of the former kind were punished by the censor, and for the latter the constitution gave no scope. The Rome of this period belonged to no individual; it was necessary for all the burgesses to be alike, that each of them might be like a king.

Appius Claudius

No doubt, even now Hellenic individual development asserted its claims by the side of that levelling system; and the genius and force which it exhibited bear, no less than the tendency to which it opposed itself, the full stamp of that great age. We can name but a single man in connection with it; but he was, as it were, the incarnation of the idea of progress. Appius Claudius (censor 442; consul 447, 458), the great-great-grandson of the decemvir, was a man of the old nobility and proud of the long line of his ancestors; but yet it was he who set aside the restriction which confined the full franchise of the state to the freeholders,[186 - II. III. The Burgess-Body] and who broke up the old system of finance.[187 - II. VIII. Impulse Given to It] From Appius Claudius date not only the Roman aqueducts and highways, but also Roman jurisprudence, eloquence, poetry, and grammar. The publication of a table of the -legis actiones-, speeches committed to writing and Pythagorean sentences, and even innovations in orthography, are attributed to him. We may not on this account call him absolutely a democrat or include him in that opposition party which found its champion in Manius Curius;[188 - II. III. New Opposition] in him on the contrary the spirit of the ancient and modern patrician kings predominated —the spirit of the Tarquins and the Caesars, between whom he forms a connecting link in that five hundred years' interregnum of extraordinary deeds and ordinary men. So long as Appius Claudius took an active part in public life, in his official conduct as well as his general carriage he disregarded laws and customs on all hands with the hardihood and sauciness of an Athenian; till, after having long retired from the political stage, the blind old man, returning as it were from the tomb at the decisive Moment, overcame king Pyrrhus in the senate, and first formally and solemnly proclaimed the complete sovereignty of Rome over Italy.[189 - II. VII. Attempts at Peace] But the gifted man came too early or too late; the gods made him blind on account of his untimely wisdom. It was not individual genius that ruled in Rome and through Rome in Italy; it was the one immoveable idea of a policy—propagated from generation to generation in the senate—with the leading maxims of which the sons of the senators became already imbued, when in the company of their fathers they went to the council and there at the door of the hall listened to the wisdom of the men whose seats they were destined at some future time to fill. Immense successes were thus obtained at an immense price; for Nike too is followed by her Nemesis. In the Roman commonwealth there was no special dependence on any one man, either on soldier or on general, and under the rigid discipline of its moral police all the idiosyncrasies of human character were extinguished. Rome reached a greatness such as no other state of antiquity attained; but she dearly purchased her greatness at the sacrifice of the graceful variety, of the easy abandon and of the inward freedom of Hellenic life.

CHAPTER IX

Art and Science

The Roman National Festival—

The Roman Stage

The growth of art, and of poetic art especially, in antiquity was intimately associated with the development of national festivals. The thanksgiving-festival of the Roman community, which had been already organized in the previous period essentially under Greek influence and in the first instance as an extraordinary festival, —the -ludi maximi- or -Romani-,[190 - I. XV. Earliest Hellenic Influences] —acquired during the present epoch a longer duration and greater variety in the amusements. Originally limited to one day, the festival was prolonged by an additional day after the happy termination of each of the three great revolutions of 245, 260, and 387, and thus at the close of this period it had already a duration of four days.[191 - The account given by Dionysius (vi. 95; comp. Niebuhr, ii. 40) and by Plutarch (Camill. 42), deriving his statement from another passage in Dionysius regarding the Latin festival, must be understood to apply rather to the Roman games, as, apart from other grounds, is strikingly evident from comparing the latter passage with Liv. vi. 42 (Ritschl, Parerg. i. p. 313). Dionysius has—and, according to his wont when in error, persistently—misunderstood the expression -ludi maximi-.There was, moreover, a tradition which referred the origin of the national festival not, as in the common version, to the conquest of the Latins by the first Tarquinius, but to the victory over the Latins at the lake Regillus (Cicero, de Div. i. 26, 55; Dionys. vii. 71). That the important statements preserved in the latter passage from Fabius really relate to the ordinary thanksgiving-festival, and not to any special votive solemnity, is evident from the express allusion to the annual recurrence of the celebration, and from the exact agreement of the sum of the expenses with the statement in the Pseudo-Asconius (p. 142 Or.).]