Lectures and Essays | Page 4

superior to her own. Pyrrhus at first beat her, but there was no nation behind him, Hannibal beat her, but his nation did not support him; she beat the army of Alexander, but the army of Alexander when it encountered her, like that of Frederic at Jena, was an old machine, and it was commanded by a man who was more like Tippoo Sahib than the conqueror of Darius.
But how came military discipline to be so specially cultivated by the Romans? We can see how it came to be specially cultivated by the Greeks: it was the necessity of civic armies, fighting perhaps against warlike aristocracies; it was the necessity of Greeks in general fighting against the invading hordes of the Persian. We can see how it came to be cultivated among the mercenaries and professional soldiers of Pyrrhus and Hannibal. But what was the motive power in the case of Rome? Dismissing the notion of occult qualities of race, we look for a rational explanation in the circumstances of the plain which was the cradle of the Roman Empire.
It is evident that in the period designated as that of the kings, when Rome commenced her career of conquest, she was, for that time and country, a great and wealthy city. This is proved by the works of the kings, the Capitoline Temple, the excavation for the Circus Maximus, the Servian Wall, and above all the Cloaca Maxima. Historians have indeed undertaken to give us a very disparaging picture of the ancient Rome, which they confidently describe as nothing more than a great village of shingle-roofed cottages thinly scattered over a large area. We ask in vain what are the materials for this description. It is most probable that the private buildings of Rome under the kings were roofed with nothing better than shingle, and it is very likely that they were mean and dirty, as the private buildings of Athens appear to have been, and as those of most of the great cities of the Middle Ages unquestionably were. But the Cloaca Maxima is in itself conclusive evidence of a large population, of wealth, and of a not inconsiderable degree of civilization. Taking our stand upon this monument, and clearing our vision entirely of Romulus and his asylum, we seem dimly to perceive the existence of a deep prehistoric background, richer than is commonly supposed in the germs of civilization,--a remark which may in all likelihood be extended to the background of history in general. Nothing surely can be more grotesque than the idea of a set of wolves, like the Norse pirates before their conversion to Christianity, constructing in their den the Cloaca Maxima.
That Rome was comparatively great and wealthy is certain. We can hardly doubt that she was a seat of industry and commerce, and that the theory which represents her industry and commerce as having been developed subsequently to her conquests is the reverse of the fact. Whence, but from industry and commerce, could the population and the wealth have come? Peasant farmers do not live in cities, and plunderers do not accumulate. Rome had around her what was then a rich and peopled plain; she stood at a meeting-place of nationalities; she was on a navigable river, yet out of the reach of pirates; the sea near her was full of commerce, Etruscan, Greek, and Carthaginian. Her first colony was Ostia, evidently commercial and connected with salt-works, which may well have supplied the staple of her trade. Her patricians were financiers and money-lenders. We are aware that a different turn has been given to this part of the story, and that the indebtedness has been represented as incurred not by loans of money, but by advances of farm stock. This, however, completely contradicts the whole tenor of the narrative, and especially what is said about the measures for relieving the debtor by reducing the rate of interest and by deducting from the principal debt the interest already paid. The narrative as it stands, moreover, is supported by analogy. It has a parallel in the economical history of ancient Athens, and in the "scaling of debts," to use the American equivalent for _Seisachtheia_, by the legislation of Solon. What prevents our supposing that usury, when it first made its appearance on the scene, before people had learned to draw the distinction between crimes and defaults, presented itself in a very coarse and cruel form? True, the currency was clumsy, and retained philological traces of a system of barter; but without commerce there could have been no currency at all.
Even more decisive is the proof afforded by the early political history of Rome. In that wonderful first decade of Livy there is no doubt enough of Livy himself to give him a high place among the masters