Lectures and Essays | Page 4

great secret of all ascendency in war.
Victories of the undisciplined over the disciplined, such as

Killiecrankie and Preston Pans, are rare exceptions which only prove
the rule. The rule is that in anything like a parity of personal prowess
and of generalship discipline is victory. Thrice Rome encountered
discipline equal or 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