History of Rome from the Earliest Times down to 476 AD | Page 8

denied. The force of the community
seemed to have spent itself for the time; as a force proceeding from the
whole community it had perhaps spent itself for ever. A section of the
nominally sovereign people might yet be welded into a mighty
instrument that would carry victory to the ends of the earth, and open
new channels of enterprise both for the men who guided their

movements and for themselves. But for the moment the State was
thrown back upon itself; it held that an end had been attained, and the
attainment naturally suggested a pause, a long survey of the results
which had been reached by these long years of struggle with the
hydra-headed enemy abroad. The close of the third Macedonian war is
said by a contemporary to have brought with it a restful sense of
security such as Rome could not have felt for centuries.[17] Such a
security gave scope to the rich to enjoy the material advantages which
their power had acquired; but it also gave scope to the poor to reflect on
the strange harvest which the conquest of the great powers of the world
had brought to the men whose stubborn patience had secured the peace
which they were given neither the means nor the leisure to enjoy. The
men who evaded or had completed their service in the legions lacked
the means, although they had the leisure; the men who still obeyed the
summons to arms lacked both, unless the respite between prolonged
campaigns could be called leisure, or the booty, hardly won and
quickly squandered, could be described as means. Even after Carthage
had been destroyed Rome, though doubly safe, was still busy enough
with her legions; the government of Spain was one protracted war, and
proconsuls were still striving to win triumphs for themselves by
improving on their predecessors' work.[18] But such war could not
absorb the energy or stimulate the interest of the people as a whole. The
reaction which had so often followed a successful campaign, when the
discipline of the camp had been shaken off and the duties of the soldier
were replaced by the wants of the citizen, was renewed on a scale
infinitely larger than before--a scale proportioned to the magnitude of
the strain which had been removed and the greatness of the wants
which had been revived. The cries for reform may have been of the old
familiar type but their increased intensity and variety may almost be
held to have given them a difference of quality. There is a stage at
which a difference of degree seems to amount to one of kind: and this
stage seems certainly to have been reached in the social problems
presented by the times. In the old days of the struggle between the
orders the question of privilege had sometimes overshadowed the
purely economic issue, and although a close scrutiny of those days of
turmoil shows that the dominant note in the conflict was often a mere
pretext meant to serve the personal ambition of the champions of the

Plebs, yet the appearance rather than the reality of an issue imposes on
the imagination of the mob, and political emancipation had been
thought a boon even when hard facts had shown that its greater prizes
had fallen to a small and selfish minority. Now, however, there could
be no illusion. There was nothing but material wants on one side, there
was nothing but material power on the other. The intellectual claims
which might be advanced to justify a monopoly of office and of wealth,
could be met by an intellectual superiority on the part of a demagogue
clamouring for confiscation. The ultimate basis of the life of the State
was for the first time to be laid bare and subjected to a merciless
scrutiny; it remained to be seen which of the two great forces of society
would prevail; the force of habit which had so often blinded the Roman
to his real needs; or the force of want which, because it so seldom won
a victory over his innate conservatism, was wont, when that victory had
been won, to sweep him farther on the path of reckless and inconsistent
reform than it would have carried a race better endowed with the gift of
testing at every stage of progress the ends and needs of the social
organism considered as a whole.
An analysis of social discontent at any period of history must take the
form of an examination of the wants engendered by the age, and of the
adequacy or inadequacy of their means of satisfaction. If we turn our
attention first to the forces of society which were in possession of the
fortress and were to be the object of attack, we shall find that the ruling