Lectures and Essays | Page 5

of fiction. It is the epic of a nation of politicians, and admirably adapted for the purposes of education as the grand picture of Roman character and the richest treasury of Roman sentiment. But we can hardly doubt that in the political portion there is a foundation of fact; it is too circumstantial, too consistent in itself, and at the same time too much borne out by analogy, to be altogether fiction. The institutions which we find existing in historic times must have been evolved by some such struggle between the orders of patricians and plebeians as that which Livy presents to us. And these politics, with their parties and sections of parties, their shades of political character, the sustained interest which they imply in political objects, their various devices and compromises, are not the politics of a community of peasant farmers, living apart each on his own farm and thinking of his own crops: they are the politics of the quick-witted and gregarious population of an industrial and commercial city. They are politics of the same sort as those upon which the Palazzo Vecchio looked down in Florence. That ancient Rome was a republic there can be no doubt. Even the so-called monarchy appears clearly to have been elective; and republicanism may be described broadly with reference to its origin, as the government of the city and of the artisan, while monarchy and aristocracy are the governments of the country and of farmers.
The legend which ascribes the assembly of centuries to the legislation of Servius probably belongs to the same class as the legend which ascribes trial by jury and the division of England into shires to the legislation of Alfred. Still the assembly of centuries existed; it was evidently ancient, belonging apparently to a stratum of institutions anterior to the assembly of tribes; and it was a constitution distributing political power and duties according to a property qualification which, in the upper grades, must, for the period, have been high, though measured by a primitive currency. The existence of such qualifications, and the social ascendency of wealth which the constitution implies, are inconsistent with the theory of a merely agricultural and military Rome. Who would think of framing such a constitution, say, for one of the rural districts of France?
Other indications of the real character of the prehistoric Rome might be mentioned. The preponderance of the infantry and the comparative weakness of the cavalry is an almost certain sign of democracy, and of the social state in which democracy takes its birth--at least in the case of a country which did not, like Arcadia or Switzerland, preclude by its nature the growth of a cavalry force, but on the contrary was rather favourable to it. Nor would it be easy to account for the strong feeling of attachment to the city which led to its restoration when it had been destroyed by the Gauls, and defeated the project of a migration to Veii, if Rome was nothing but a collection of miserable huts, the abodes of a tribe of marauders. We have, moreover, the actual traces of an industrial organization in the existence of certain guilds of artisans, which may have been more important at first than they were when the military spirit had become thoroughly ascendant.
Of course when Rome had once been drawn into the career of conquest, the ascendency of the military spirit would be complete; war, and the organization of territories acquired in war, would then become the great occupation of her leading citizens; industry and commerce would fall into disesteem, and be deemed unworthy of the members of the imperial race. Carthage would no doubt have undergone a similar change of character, had the policy which was carried to its greatest height by the aspiring house of Barcas succeeded in converting her from a trading city into the capital of a great military empire. So would Venice, had she been able to carry on her system of conquest in the Levant and of territorial aggrandisement on the Italian mainland. The career of Venice was arrested by the League of Cambray. On Carthage the policy of military aggrandisement, which was apparently resisted by the sage instinct of the great merchants while it was supported by the professional soldiers and the populace, brought utter ruin; while Rome paid the inevitable penalty of military despotism. Even when the Roman nobles had become a caste of conquerors and proconsuls, they retained certain mercantile habits; unlike the French aristocracy, and aristocracies generally, they were careful keepers of their accounts, and they showed a mercantile talent for business, as well as a more than mercantile hardness, in their financial exploitation of the conquered world. Brutus and his contemporaries were usurers like the patricians of the early times. No one, we