The History of Rome by Theodor Mommsen (autobiographies to read txt) 📕

but through which, from the cool and dispassionate character of his crimes, he certainly appears to the moral judgment more revolting than the criminal acting from passion. Outlawries, rewards to executioners, confiscations of goods, summary procedure with insubordinate officers had occurred a hundred times, and the obtuse political morality of ancient civilization had for such things only lukewarm censure; but it was unexampled that the names of the outlaws should be publicly posted up and their heads publicly exposed, that a set sum should be fixed for the bandits who slew them and that it should be duly entered in the public account-books, that the confiscated property should be brought to the hammer like the spoil of an enemy in the public market, that the general should order a refractory officer to be at once cut down and acknowledge the deed before all the people. This public mockery of humanity was also a political error; it contributed not a little to envenom later revolutionary crises beforehand, and on that account even now a dark shadow deservedly rests on the memory of the author of the proscriptions.

Sulla may moreover be justly blamed that, while in all important matters he acted with remorseless vigour, in subordinate and more especially in personal questions he very frequently yielded to his sanguine temperament and dealt according to his likings or dislikings. Wherever he really felt hatred, as for instance against the Marians, he allowed it to take its course without restraint even against the innocent, and boasted of himself that no one had better requited friends and foes.(52) He did not disdain on occasion of his plenitude of power to accumulate a colossal fortune. The first absolute monarch of the Roman state, he verified the maxim of absolutism—that the laws do not bind the prince—forthwith in the case of those laws which he himself issued as to adultery and extravagance. But his lenity towards his own party and his own circle was more pernicious for the state than his indulgence towards himself. The laxity of his military discipline, although it was partly enjoined by his political exigencies, may be reckoned as coming under this category; but far more pernicious was his indulgence towards his political adherents. The extent of his occasional forbearance is hardly credible: for instance Lacius Murena was not only released from punishment for defeats which he sustained through arrant perversity and insubordination,(53) but was even allowed a triumph; Gnaeus Pompeius, who had behaved still worse, was still more extravagantly honoured by Sulla.(54) The extensive range and the worst enormities of the proscriptions and confiscations probably arose not so much from Sulla's own wish as from this spirit of indifference, which in his position indeed was hardly more pardonable. That Sulla with his intrinsically energetic and yet withal indifferent temperament should conduct himself very variously, sometimes with incredible indulgence, sometimes with inexorable severity, may readily be conceived. The saying repeated a thousand times, that he was before his regency a good-natured, mild man, but when regent a bloodthirsty tyrant, carries in it its own refutation; if he as regent displayed the reverse of his earlier gentleness, it must rather be said that he punished with the same careless nonchalance with which he pardoned. This half-ironical frivolity pervades his whole political action. It is always as if the victor, just as it pleased him to call his merit in gaining victory good fortune, esteemed the victory itself of no value; as if he had a partial presentiment of the vanity and perishableness of his own work; as if after the manner of a steward he preferred making repairs to pulling down and rebuilding, and allowed himself in the end to be content with a sorry plastering to conceal the flaws.

Sulla after His Retirement

But, such as he was, this Don Juan of politics was a man of one mould. His whole life attests the internal equilibrium of his nature; in the most diverse situations Sulla remained unchangeably the same. It was the same temper, which after the brilliant successes in Africa made him seek once more the idleness of the capital, and after the full possession of absolute power made him find rest and refreshment in his Cuman villa. In his mouth the saying, that public affairs were a burden which he threw off so soon as he might and could, was no mere phrase. After his resignation he remained entirely like himself, without peevishness and without affectation, glad to be rid of public affairs and yet interfering now and then when opportunity offered. Hunting and fishing and the composition of his memoirs occupied his leisure hours; by way of interlude he arranged, at the request of the discordant citizens, the internal affairs of the neighbouring colony of Puteoli as confidently and speedily as he had formerly arranged those of the capital. His last action on his sickbed had reference to the collection of a contribution for the rebuilding of the Capitoline temple, of which he was not allowed to witness the completion.

Death of Sulla

Little more than a year after his retirement, in the sixtieth year of his life, while yet vigorous in body and mind, he was overtaken by death; after a brief confinement to a sick-bed—he was writing at his autobiography two days even before his death—the rupture of a blood- vessel(55) carried him off (676). His faithful fortune did not desert him even in death. He could have no wish to be drawn once more into the disagreeable vortex of party struggles, and to be obliged to lead his old warriors once more against a new revolution; yet such was the state of matters at his death in Spain and in Italy, that he could hardly have been spared this task had his life been prolonged. Even now when it was suggested that he should have a public funeral in the capital, numerous voices there, which had been silent in his lifetime, were raised against the last honour which it was proposed to show to the tyrant. But his memory was still too fresh and the dread of his old soldiers too vivid: it was resolved that the body should be conveyed to the capital and that the obsequies should be celebrated there.

His Funeral

Italy never witnessed a grander funeral solemnity. In every place through which the deceased was borne in regal attire, with his well- known standards and fasces before him, the inhabitants and above all his old soldiers joined the mourning train: it seemed as if the whole army would once more meet round the hero in death, who had in life led it so often and never except to victory. So the endless funeral procession reached the capital, where the courts kept holiday and all business was suspended, and two thousand golden chaplets awaited the dead—the last honorary gifts of the faithful legions, of the cities, and of his more intimate friends. Sulla, faithful to the usage of the Cornelian house, had ordered that his body should be buried without being burnt; but others were more mindful than he was of what past days had done and future days might do: by command of the senate the corpse of the man who had disturbed the bones of Marius from their rest in the grave was committed to the flames. Headed by all the magistrates and the whole senate, by the priests and priestesses in their official robes and the band of noble youths in equestrian armour, the procession arrived at the great market-place; at this spot, filled by his achievements and almost by the sound as yet of his dreaded words, the funeral oration was delivered over the deceased; and thence the bier was borne on the shoulders of senators to the Campus Martius, where the funeral pile was erected. While the flames were blazing, the equites and the soldiers held their race of honour round the corpse; the ashes of the regent were deposited in the Campus Martius beside the tombs of the old kings, and the Roman women mourned him for a year.

CHAPTER XI

The Commonwealth and Its Economy

External and Internal Bankruptcy of the Roman State

We have traversed a period of ninety years—forty years of profound peace, fifty of an almost constant revolution. It is the most inglorious epoch known in Roman history. It is true that the Alps were crossed both in an easterly and westerly direction,(1) and the Roman arms reached in the Spanish peninsula as far as the Atlantic Ocean(2) and in the Macedono-Grecian peninsula as far as the Danube;(3) but the laurels thus gained were as cheap as they were barren. The circle of the "extraneous peoples under the will, sway, dominion, or friendship of the Roman burgesses,"(4) was not materially extended; men were content to realize the gains of a better age and to bring the communities, annexed to Rome in laxer forms of dependence, more and more into full subjection. Behind the brilliant screen of provincial reunions was concealed a very sensible decline of Roman power. While the whole ancient civilization was daily more and more distinctly embraced in the Roman state, and embodied there in forms of more general validity, the nations excluded from it began simultaneously beyond the Alps and beyond the Euphrates to pass from defence to aggression. On the battle- fields of Aquae Sextiae and Vercellae, of Chaeronea and Orchomenus, were heard the first peals of that thunderstorm, which the Germanic tribes and the Asiatic hordes were destined to bring upon the Italo- Grecian world, and the last dull rolling of which has reached almost to our own times. But in internal development also this epoch bears the same character. The old organization collapses irretrievably. The Roman commonwealth was planned as an urban community, which through its free burgess-body gave to itself rulers and laws; which was governed by these well-advised rulers within these legal limits with kingly freedom; and around which the Italian confederacy, as an aggregate of free urban communities essentially homogeneous and cognate with the Roman, and the body of extra-Italian allies, as an aggregate of Greek free cities and barbaric peoples and principalities—both more superintended, than domineered over, by the community of Rome—formed a double circle. It was the final result of the revolution—and both parties, the nominally conservative as well as the democratic party, had co- operated towards it and concurred in it—that of this venerable structure, which at the beginning of the present epoch, though full of chinks and tottering, still stood erect, not one stone was at its close left upon another. The holder of sovereign power was now either a single man, or a close oligarchy—now of rank, now of riches. The burgesses had lost all legitimate share in the government. The magistrates were instruments without independence in the hands of the holder of power for the time being. The urban community of Rome had broken down by its unnatural enlargement. The Italian confederacy had been merged in the urban community. The body of extra-Italian allies was in full course of being converted into a body of subjects. The whole organic classification of the Roman commonwealth had gone to wreck, and nothing was left but a crude mass of more or less disparate elements.

The Prospect

The state of matters threatened to end in utter anarchy and in the inward and outward dissolution of the state. The political movement tended thoroughly towards the goal of despotism; the only point still in dispute was whether the close circle of the families of rank, or the senate of capitalists, or a monarch was to be the despot. The political movement followed thoroughly the paths that led to despotism; the fundamental principle of a free commonwealth— that the contending powers should reciprocally confine themselves to indirect coercion—had become effete in the eyes of all parties alike, and on both sides the fight for power began to be carried on first by the bludgeon, and soon by the sword. The revolution, at an end in so far as the old constitution was recognized by both sides as finally set aside and the aim and method of the new political development were clearly settled, had yet up to this time discovered nothing but provisional solutions for this problem of the reorganization of the state; neither the Gracchan nor the Sullan constitution of the community bore the stamp of finality. But the bitterest feature of this bitter time was that even hope and effort failed the clear-seeing patriot. The sun of freedom with all its endless store of blessings was constantly drawing nearer to its setting, and the twilight was settling over the very world that was still so brilliant. It was no accidental catastrophe which patriotism and genius might have warded off; it was ancient social