"Whenever a tyrant abandoned himself to his ar- mies, and left the citizens exposed to military vio- lence and rapine, this state of things could only con- tinue during a single reign; for the soldiers, by the destructive excess of their license, went so far as to destroy the very means of their own support; and it thereupon became necessary to think of re-estab- lishing the military discipline — an enterprise which always cost the life of him who dared to attempt it.
After Caracalla had been killed by the creatures of Macrinus, the soldiers — rendered desperate by the loss of one who had lavished his favors upon them 328 GKAOT»EUE AND DECADENCE [MOSiESQniEU.
without measure — elected Heliogabalus; " and when the latter — who occupied himself solely with his filthy voluptuousness, and left the soldiers to Uve as they pleased— could no longer be endured, they mas- sacred him also. With equal readiness they killed Alexander, who wished to re-establish discipline, and who spoke of punishing them." And thus a tyrant, who was able to commit crimes, but was unable to provide for the security of his own life, perished with the same destructive facUity as he who desired to do better perished after him.
After Alexander, Maximin was elected. He was the first emperor of barbaric origin. His gigantic height and his great physical strength had brought him into notice. Both he and his son were killed by his soldiers. The first two Gordians perished in Africa. Maximus, Balbinus, and the third Gordian were massacred. Philip, who had procured the mur- der of the young Gordian, was himself killed, together with his son; and Decius, who was elected in his place, perished in his turn by the treachery of Gallus.""
" At this time all sorta of men believed themselves eligible to the empire. See Dion, lib. Ixxix.
'^ See Lampridius.
"' Cassaubon remarks upon the Augv^tan History that, duriag the one hundred and sixty years which it embraces, there were seventy persons who bore, justly or unjustly, the title of Caesar. "Adco erani in illo principatu, quern iamen omnes miraniur, comiiia imperii semper incerta "; from which it is manifest how great was the difference between this gov- ernment and that of France, in which there have been but sixty-three kings in twelve hundred years.
" For a more general and more particular idea of the destructive fate CHAP. XVI.] • OF THE EOMAKS. 329 That which is called the Eoman empire was, at this period, a species of irregular republic, much the same as the aristocracy of Algiers, iu which the sol- diers, who hold the sovereign power, make and un- make the magistrate whom we call the Dey; and per- haps it is a tolerably general rule that military gov- ernments are, iu certain respects, rather republican than monarchical.
Let it not be thought that the soldiers took no part in the government except by their disobediences and their revolts. Were not the harangues which the emperors delivered to them essentially of the same nature as those which the consuls and the trib- unes had formerly delivered to the people? And although the armies had no particular place for as- sembling, and were governed by no definite forms — although they did not, as a general thing, proceed with coolness, used as they were to deliberating little and acting much — yet, did they not exercise a sover- eign control over the fortunes of the empire? and what was an emperor but the- minister of a govern- ment of force, elected to subserve the particular in- terests of the soldiers?
When the army associated Philip with the em- pire "* — ^he being at the time preetorian prefect of the third Gordian — the latter requested that the sole comwhieh attended the Roman emperors, see the concluding part of my Note at the end of this chapter. — Tkanslatoe. '* Julius Capitolinus.
330 GRANDEUR AND DECADENCE [montesquieu.
mand miglit be left in his hands; but his request was denied. He harangued the army in order to induce it to divide the power equally between him and Philip; and this also was denied. He supplicated that the title of Csesar might be left to him; and this, too, was refused. He asked that he might be made prag- torian prefect; and, this being equally denied, he finally spoke for his life. The army, in passing these divers judgments, exercised the supreme power of the state.
The barbarians, who were originally unknown to the Eomans, and who at later periods had only been annoying to them, were now become formidable. By the most extraordinary career of success that the world has seen, Eome had so completely annihilated all nations that, when she came to be conquered herself, it seemed as if the earth had given a new birth to the destroyed peoples, in order to prepare the means for her own destruction.
The rulers of great states generally have but few neighbors who are objects of their ambition. Should neighbors of this kind have once existed, they would have been enveloped in the course of conquest. Such states are, therefore, bounded by seas, mountains, and deserts — by outlying regions the poverty of which causes them to be despised." Thus it was that the '' It will be observed that this characterization of a great state is altogether more applicable to ancient times — when the spirit of conquest was so much more active — than it is to the circumstances of the modem world. — Translator.
CHAP. XVI.] OP THE ROMANS. 331 Eomans left the Germans in their forests, and the peoples of the North in their ice and snow; and there it was that those nations were preserved, or even formed, by which they were themselves finally subdued.
Under the reign of GaUus, a great number of nations — who afterwards became more celebrated — ravaged Europe; and the Persians, having invaded Syria, only abandoned their conquests in order to se- cure their spoils.
Those swarms of barbarians which formerly poured down from the ]!^orth are no longer seen. Eoman violence had caused the nations to retire from the South to the ITorth. As long as the force which pressed them back remained unabated, they continued in their new seats. When this force came to be en- feebled, they spread themselves everywhere.^" The same thing took place some centuries later. The con- quests and the tyrannies of Charlemagne had a sec- ond time caused a movement of nations from the South to the ITorth; and, as soon as this empire became weakened, they flowed a second time from the North to the South. And if, at the present day, some monarch should again commit the same ravages in Europe, the nations, driven to the North — ^pressed back to the limits of the earth — would there abide firmly until the moment arrived when '" We see to what the famous question is reduced: " Why is the North no longer as populous as it formerly was? " 332 GRANDEUR AND DECADENCE [montesquief.
they would inundate and conquer Europe a third time."
The frightful disorder which prevailed in the suc- cession to the empire having reached its height, we see towards the end of the reign of Yalerian, and during that of Galhenus his son, thirty different pre- tenders to the imperial purple, who, having for the most part destroyed each other, and having had reigns which were very short, received the name of tyrants."
Yalerian having been taken prisoner by the Per- sians, and Gallienus, his son, neglecting the affairs of the state, the barbarians penetrated on all sides. The empire was in the same condition in which we find it about a century later in the "West;" and it would have been destroyed at that time but for a concur- rence of fortunate circumstances which relieved it.
Odenatus — prince of Palmyra and ally of the Ko- mans — drove back the Persians, who had invaded al- most the whole of Asia, The city of Kome raised an army of its own citizens, and dispersed the bar- barians who came to pillage it. An innumerable army of Scythians, which had crossed the sea in six *' For a neglected but important cause of the great power of the northern barbarians during the closing ages of the Western Empire, see my Note at the end of this chapter. — Translator.
'^ Gibbon reduces the number to nineteen, but yet implies that it may be thirty, if we count the women and children upon whom the im- perial title was conferred. (Vol. i, pp. 321, 322.) — Translator.
'' One hundred and fifty years later, under Honorius, the barbarians OTerran the empire.
CHAP. XVI.] OF THE ROMAICS. 333 thousand vessels, peiaslied from shipwreck, exposure, famine, and its own magnitude. And, Gallienus hav- ing been killed, Claudius, Aurelian, Tacitus, and Pro- bus — four great men who fortunately succeeded each other — re-established the empire — which was on the verge of ruin.
334 GRANDEUR AND DECADENCE [badb.
NOTE BY THE TKANSLATOK.
In the course of the preceding chapter Montes- quiea touches very cursorily upon several subjects of marked interest, most of which, indeed, are of great significance in estimating the spirit of Eoman history. The Stoical Philosophy, which was received by the Romans from the Greeks — the characters of the two Antonines, the noblest productions of that philosophy — the Popular Superstition of the Komans, as seen under the aspect of its darkest trait — ^the growing power of the Barbarians of the North, as connected with a cause which has not been much noticed — and the Tragic Succession of the emperors of the West, as indicating the low social state of the Eoman world — will, therefore, be the subjects of some fur- ther reflections.
I. In view of the practical inflaence exerted upon the Koman character by the various systems of Greek philosophy during the five centuries pre- ceding Constantino, Macintosh very justly assigns the preference to the school of the stoics. " If," says he, " any conclusion may be hazarded from this trial NOTE.J OF THE ROMANS. 335 of systems — tlie greatest which history has recorded — we must not refuse our decided, though not undis- tinguishing, preference to that noble school which preserved great souls untainted at the court of disso- lute and ferocious tyrants; which exalted the slave of one of Nero's courtiers to be the moral teacher of after times; which for the first, and hitherto for the only time, breathed philosophy and justice into those rules of law which govern the ordinary concerns of every man; and which, above all, has contributed, by the examples of Marcus Fortius Cato and of Mar- cus Aurelius Antoninus, to raise the dignity of our species, to keep alive a more ardent love of Virtue, and a more awful sense of duty throughout all gen- erations." ' Here is not the place to discuss such a question at any length, but I believe it can be shown, first, that the central idea of the Greek stoicism — ascen- dency of the reason and moral sentiments over the passions and appetites — does not admit of limitation to any special system of philosophy, but belongs to the common sense of mankind; secondly, that this idea underlies all the best precepts which were pre- scribed for the conduct of life in the ancient world —whether among Greeks, Eomans, Egyptians, Per- sians, Hindoos, or Chinese; and, thirdly, that the same idea is fundamental to the best ethical concep- tions among the moderns. "Whatever may be true or ' Dissertation on the Progress of Ethical PTdlosophy, sec. ii.
336 GRANDEUR AND DECADENCE [baker.
false as to other hierarchies, there is certainly a hierarchy of the powers of man's nature, the su- preme law of which is, that well-being demands that the superior shall rule the inferior. This law is so forced upon man's attention by his actual expe- rience in every condition of life, that it has taken some place in the systematic ethics of all cultivated nations, and has been extensively incorporated into the "folk lore" of every people. The distinction of the intellectual Greeks was, that they gave the deepest and richest expression to the law, and thus drew to themselves the credit of being in some sense the originators of a species of moral truth which has been felt and acted upon among mankind generally. In the whole range of ethical literature, it would be difficult to find a better statement of that general principle upon which stoicism rests — and which ap- peals so directly to the common apprehension of men — than is found in the following fine stoical passage from Hooker: "First, therefore, having ob- served that the best things, where they are not hin- dered, do still produce the best operations, (for which cause, where many things are to concur unto one ef- fect, the best is in all congruity of reason to guide the residue, that, it prevailing most, the work princi- pally done by it may have greatest perfection;) when, hereupon, we come to observe in ourselves, of what excellency our souls are in comparison of our bodies, and the diviner part in relation unto the baser of NOTE.] OF THE ROMANS. 337 our souls; seeing that all these concur in producing human action, it cannot be well unless the chiefest do command and direct the rest. The soul, then, ought to conduct the body, and the spirit of our minds the soul. This is, therefore, the first Law, whereby the highest power of the mind requireth general obedience at the hands of all the rest con- curring with it unto action.""
Nothing can excel the beauty and tnith of the philosophy thus enunciated — a philosophy which, wherever practiced, has elevated and ennobled hu- man nature; and the influence of which upon the lives of particular Romans has given to history some of its noblest characters — even amid that dreary waste of criminality and moral decay that attended the declining empire.
II. A personal interest of a high order attaches to the characters of the two Antonines, and a still higher interest which is not personal: they were pro- ductions of the ancient system — of the stoical school. As such, they may be presented as the best practical results of the ancient philosophy, and as a sort of test, therefore, of its possible capacity. I here incor- porate De Quincey's idea of both these extraordinary men: " The elder of the two, who is usually distin- guished by the title of Pius, is thus described by one of his biographers: ' He was externally of remarkable « Ecd. Pol., Book I, ch. 8, sec. 6. 15 338 GRANDEUR AND DECADENCE [baker.
beauty; eminent for his moral character, full of be- nign dispositions, noble, with a countenance of a most gentle expression, intellectually of singular endow- ments, possessing an elegant style of eloquence, dis- tinguished for his literature, generally temperate, an earnest lover of agricultural pursuits, mild in his de- portment, bountiful in the use of his own, but a stern respecter of the rights of others; and, finally, he was all this without ostentation, and with a constant regard to the proportions of cases, and to the de- mands of time and place.'...Little, indeed, did Pius want of being a perfect Christian in heart and in practice." Proceeding from the character of Pius to that of Marcus, the same writer says: " A thoughtful Eoman would have been apt to exclaim. This is too good to last, upon finding so admirable a ruler suc- ceeded by one still more admirable in the person of Marcus Aurelius ": ' and he applies to the latter the hypothesis that he must have experienced a "sub- conscious influence" from Christianity — a surmise which may, indeed, contain some possible measure of truth, but which it seems difficult to reconcile with the circumstance that this emperor persecuted the Christians — a fact, by the way, which De Quincey curiously overlooks in estimating his character.
In assigning to the emperor Pius a character which he regards as all but perfect, and to Marcus a higher one still, De Quincey probably expresses the NOTE.] OF THE ROMANS. 339 prevailing opinion among recent scholars. The pref- erence thus given to the younger Antoninus is doubt- less largely owing to his " Meditations," a work which takes an eminent place in the world's literature of moral thought. Pius claims no such literary distinc- tion; but the fact that this man — although charged during so many years with the immense powers of a Roman emperor — has given to history a life which appears to be wholly without reproach, whilst that of his successor is tarnished by the single stain of per- secution,. seems to supply a solid ground of prefer- ence in his favor. The emperor Marcus may have possessed a higher order of intellectual endowments; and, barring the single stain alluded to, he was a prodigy in the practice of all the virtues. He ap- pears to have just missed being the most illustrious prince that has ever ruled over men.
On the whole, it seems fair to say that it would be difficult to name, in the entire history of the world, two sovereigns who have supported authority with equal self-control, or who have so beautifully exemplified the advantages which flow from philoso- phy enthroned with power.
III. The religion of the Eomans was but a great phase of that general system of Polytheism which, ethnically, was coextensive with the Indo-European races, whilst geographically it was diffused from In- dia to the Atlantic Ocean. Probably the most sig- nificant character of this system of religious ideas 340 GRANDEUR AND DECADENCE [bakeb.
and usages is the negative one, that it sustained but a feeble relation to the virtue of humanity; and it appears certain that that new doctrine of Charity, which took its historical origin in Judea, and among a Semitic people — and which is, hitherto, the world's highest spiritual product — was much more nearly an- ticipated by the philosophy of the Greeks than by the religion of Polytheism.
There is but one feature of the religion of the Romans which I here propose to point out. It is one, however, of large representative value — giv- ing, perhaps, a darker idea of the mental status of the masses of the Eo^ian people than anything else which is found in their history, not even except- ing the horrors of the gladiatorial spectacle. I allude to the practice of human sacrifice. We have seen that this practice probably attained its most revolting proportions, as it certainly assumed its most revolting form, among the Carthaginians, and the Phcsnician Semites from whom they derived their origin.* But, in greater or less degrees, the practice appears to have been diffused quite generally over the ancient world. We meet it among Gauls, Germans, Brit- ons, Eomans, and Greeks. The story of Iphigenia, in which so much tragic interest has centered, might as well have been truth as fiction. It is quite in' harmony with the probabilities of early Greek hfe. Aristomenes is represented as sacrificing three hun- ^ See my Note, at the end of chapter iv.
NOTE.] OF THE ROMANS. 341 dred human victims to Jupiter, a Spartan king being one of tlie number. Just before joining in the bat- tle of Salamis, Themistocles, or rather his soothsayer and his ignorant soldiers, sacrificed three beautiful Persian captives — reputed nephews of Xerxes — to the god Bacchus Omestes; and upon the altar of the Arcadian Bacchus, "young damsels were beaten to death with bundles of rods.'"
This rite of human sacrifice, in one form or another, stains the history of Kome from the earliest ages down to the time of the empire. "We have abeady seen that the mutual slaughter of the gladia- tors themselves originally involved the idea of a sacrifice to the manes of the dead." In the time of the kings it is said that certain classes of offenders were devoted by law to the infernal gods, and might be slain by any one who chose to do so. It appears also that in early times boys were annually sacri- ficed; and that it was customary, on the ides of May, to throw thirty old men from one of the bridges into the Tiber, as an offering to the souls of the dead. In the time of the republic, it was lawful for any consul, dictator, or praetor to devote to the gods either himself or any member of a regularly enrolled legion, the idea being that the enemy were devoted along with the victim, and that the soul of the latter, aided by the infernal powers, drew them ' Potter's Grecian Antiquities, Edinburgh, 1808, vol. i, pp. 257, 268; and Plutarch's Life of Tliemistocles.
* See my Note at the end of chapter xv.
312 GRANDEUR AND DECADENCE [bakeh.
after him to the earth and to the shades below. Livy mentions two notable instances of consuls who thus devoted themselves on the field of bat- tle.'
The sacrifice was at times expiatory. Thus — to recur to an incident referred to in a former note — after the disaster of Oannse — among other expurga- tory proceedings, two men and two women were let down alive into a walled pit in the cattle market; and the historian who records the incident, while claiming with doubtful credit that the rite was not Roman, admits that the same spot had previously been polluted by human sacrifice." As late as the year 45 b. c, it is related that two men were sacri- ficed in the Campus Martius by the priests of Mars; and even so late as the time of Horace, boys were yet slain in connection with the rites of magic. Sex- tus Pompey — son of Pompey the Great — inflated by his naval power, and assuming the distinction of " the son of Neptune," cast Kving men into the sea as offerings to that god; and on the ides of March, in the year 40 b. c, Octavius ordered three hundred, or, as another authority has it, four hundred, senators and knights of the opposing faction " to be sacrificed as victims on the altar of Julius Ccesar " — an instance, however, so mixed up with the venomous party hatred ' Adam's Rom. Ant., Phila., 1872, pp. 214, 215, 221; Livy, Book VIII, ch. ix; Book X, oh. xxviii. « Livy, Book SSH, chap. Ivii.
NOTE.] OF THE ROMANS. 343 of the time that it is difficult to determine the exact nature of the sacrifice."
We must rationally conclude that, in the course of Koman history, the number of human victims who were sacrificed in order to satisfy the demands of an ignorant superstition was very much greater than we have any account of; and that the religious conceptions of a large section of the Koman mind were upon much the same level as those of the Az- tecs at the time of Cortes. There was, however, a more advanced order of thought in the state, and a consequent protest — ^long futile, or only partially ef- fective— against the benighted custom of human sac- rifice.
On the legal side, Junius Brutus has the credit of interfering with it, and in some degree checking it, in the first days of the republic; and then, after a long interval, we come, in the year 96 b. c, upon a decree of the senate which wholly or partially pro- hibited the practice."
On the side of enlightened opinion, the cultivated intellect of Eome commenced early to be detached from the absurdities, and especially from the atroci- ties, of the popular superstition. But so powerful was the popular belief, and so ready its ministers to give it efEect, that we reach the time of the first ' Adam's Rom. Ant., Phila., 18T2, p. 215; Suetonius in Octavius, ch. 15; Ferguson's Rome, ch. xxxiii; Anthon's Clas. Die., art. Potnpems. '» Adam's Rom. Ant, Phila., 1872, pp. 215 and 221.
34:4 GRAJSTDEITR AND DECADENCE [bakee.
emperors before the blood of human victims ceased to flow, either as an offering to the gods or to the souls of the dead; and thus we have, in the case of the Komans, a striking illustration of the general law of history — that in all progressive societies the popu- lar religious ideas yield tardily to the advancing so- cial movement.
IV. I suspect that a neglected, but veiy impor- tant, cause of the final overthrow of the Roman power by the nations of the North may be found in the pro- gressive diffusion of the use of iron among these rude peoples, and in the consequent positive increase of their military force and eiSciency.
The earliest periods of Greek and Koman history seem to abut upon an Age of Bronze. " It is stated," says Professor Worsaae, "by Homer, Hesiod, and other authors, that the Greeks in the most ancient time, before they had knowledge of iron, used bronze, which was also the case with the Komans." At later, though yet remote pei'iods in their history, these leaders of ancient European civilization appear to have gradually acquired the use of iron. "Already in the time of Homer," says the same writer, "the Greeks had iron, although it was very scarce and expensive; the Romans seem to have had and used iron before the kings were expelled." Thence the use of iron appears to have spread slowly among the peoples of the North. Professor Worsaae con- tinues: "It was partly an effect of Greek and Eo- MOTE.] OF THE ROMAifS. 345 man influence that the use of iron was known at a comparatively early period in the northern parts of Italy, in South Germany, and Gallia, the inhabitants of which countries were thereby enabled to contend BO gallantly with the Eomans. Polybius mentions, however, that the Gauls, who, about two hundred years before Christ, fought against the Eomans in the north of Italy, were obliged in their battles to straighten their swords by putting their feet upon them, because they bent when exposed to a heavy blow; a fact which shows that the Gauls did not then possess steel. The invention of making the iron hard is attributed to the Celts of Noricum; in the time of Augustus, the Noric swords were famous in Home.
" But, if the people in the neighborhood of Eome, and influenced by Eoman civilization, at the com- mencement of the Christian era, generally possessed weapons of iron, it does not follow that the people in the North had also, at so early a time, plenty of that metal. Caesar says distinctly that, in Britain, iron was only to be found at the coasts, and that in such small quantities that the inhabitants used im- ported bronze {'cere utantiM^ importato''). It must also be remembered that he speaks of their using iron rings as money. A century after Christ, the Britons seem to have got a great deal more iron, but the Germans had still so little of it that they very rarely had swords, or large lance-heads, of that metal.
346 GRiNDEUR AND DECADENCE [bakek.
It was when the Romans got colonies in Hungary, Germany, Gaul, and Britain, or about from the third century of the Christian era, that their civilization first got some influence in the northern part of Ger- many, and in Scandinavia, where, however, it evi- dently had a hard struggle with the old civiliza- tion.""
The same learned antiquary states further, that the iron-period "can first be traced with any cer- tainty in Sweden and Norway as late as the fourth and fifth centuries "; and, that we cannot " carry the complete introduction of the civilization of the iron- period into Denmark farther back than to the sixth and seventh centuries." " "We may say comprehensively, therefore, that the history of the ancient progress of the use of iron runs parallel with the history of the diffusion of ancient civilization in Europe; and, that it took about fifteen centuries, or from the time of Homer down to the sixth century after Christ, for the ef- ficient use of iron to advance from the Mediterra- nean to the northernmost limits of Europe. And we can readily see that, as the use of this metal worked its way north, the invasions of the South which proceeded from that quarter would become more formidable.
V. Much light may be shed upon the downward " rrimeval Antiquilies of Denmark, Loudon, 1849, pp. 138-140. " Idem, p. 142.
NOTE.] OF THE ROMANS. 347