History of Rome from the Earliest Times down to 476 AD | Page 4

rivalry
between Marius and Sulla. Internal politics of Rome; reaction in favour
of the nobility; election of Serranus and Caepio (B.C. 107). The
judiciary law of Caepio (B.C. 106). The measure supported by Crassus.
Reaction against the proposal; victory of the Equites; renewed coalition
against the senate due to the conduct of the campaign in the North. The
consular elections for the year 105 B.C. Effect of the defeat at Arausio
(6th Oct. 105 B.C.). Election of Marius to a second consulship.
MAPS
The Wäd Mellag and the surrounding territory. Numidia and the
Roman Province of Africa. Titles of modern works referred to in the
notes.
_Does the Eagle know what is in the pit? Or wilt thou go ask the Mole?
Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod? Or Love in a golden bowl?_
BLAKE

A HISTORY OF ROME



CHAPTER I
The period of Roman history on which we now enter is, like so many
that had preceded it, a period of revolt, directly aimed against the
existing conditions of society and, through the means taken to satisfy
the fresh wants and to alleviate the suddenly realised, if not suddenly
created, miseries of the time, indirectly affecting the structure of the
body politic. The difference between the social movement of the
present and that of the past may be justly described as one of degree, in
so far as there was not a single element of discontent visible in the
revolution commencing with the Gracchi and ending with Caesar that
had not been present in the earlier epochs of social and political
agitation. The burden of military service, the curse of debt, the poverty

of an agrarian proletariate, the hunger for land, the striving of the
artisan and the merchant after better conditions of labour and of
trade--the separate cries of discontent that find their unison in a protest
against the monopoly of office and the narrow or selfish rule of a
dominant class, and thus gain a significance as much political as
social--all these plaints had filled the air at the time when Caius
Licinius near the middle of the fourth century, and Appius Claudius at
its close, evolved their projects of reform. The cycle of a nation's
history can indeed never be broken as long as the character of the
nation remains the same. And the average Roman of the middle of the
second century before our era[1] was in all essential particulars the
Roman of the times of Appius and of Licinius, or even of the epoch
when the ten commissioners had published the Tables which were to
stamp its perpetual character on Roman law. He was in his business
relations either oppressor or oppressed, either hammer or anvil. In his
private life he was an individualist whose sympathies were limited to
the narrow circle of his dependants; he was a trader and a financier
whose humanitarian instincts were subordinated to a code of purely
commercial morality, and who valued equity chiefly because it
presented the line of least resistance and facilitated the conduct of his
industrial operations. Like all individualists, he was something of an
anarchist, filled with the idea, which appeared on every page of the
record of his ancestors and the history of his State, that self-help was
the divinely given means of securing right, that true social order was
the issue of conflicting claims pushed to their breaking point until a
temporary compromise was agreed on by the weary combatants; but he
was hampered in his democratic leanings by the knowledge that
democracy is the fruit of individual self-restraint and subordination to
the common will--qualities of which he could not boast and symbols of
a prize which he would not have cared to attain at the expense of his
peculiar ideas of personal freedom--and he was forced, in consequence
of this abnegation, to submit to an executive government as strong, one
might almost say as tyrannous, as any which a Republic has ever
displayed--a government which was a product of the restless spirit of
self-assertion and self-aggrandisement which the Roman felt in himself,
and therefore had sufficient reason to suspect in others.

The Roman was the same; but his environment had changed more
startlingly during the last fifty or sixty years than in all the centuries
that had preceded them in the history of the Republic. The conquest of
Italy had, it Is true, given to his city much that was new and fruitful in
the domains of religion, of art, of commerce and of law. Bat these
accretions merely entailed the fuller realisation of a tendency which
had been marked from the earliest stage of Republican history--the
tendency to fit isolated elements in the marvellous discoveries made by
the heaven-gifted race of the Greeks into a framework that