Lectures and Essays | Page 6

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 venture to think, who has been accustomed
to study national character, will believe that the Roman character was
formed by war alone: it was manifestly formed by war combined with
business.
To what an extent the later character of Rome affected national

tradition, or rather fiction, as to her original character, we see from the
fable which tells us that she had no navy before the first Punic war, and
that when compelled to build a fleet by the exigencies of that war, she
had to copy a Carthaginian war galley which had been cast ashore, and
to train her rowers by exercising them on dry land. She had a fleet
before the war with Pyrrhus, probably from the time at which she took
possession of Antium, if not before; and her first treaty with Carthage
even if it is to be assigned to the date to which Mommsen, and not to
that which Polybius assigns it, shows that before 348 B.C. she had an
interest in a wide sea-board, which must have carried with it some
amount of maritime power.
Now this wealthy, and, as we suppose, industrial and commercial city
was the chief place, and in course of time became the mistress and
protectress, of a plain large for that part of Italy, and then in such a
condition as to be tempting to the spoiler. Over this plain on two sides
hung ranges of mountains inhabited by hill tribes, Sabines, AEquians,
Volscians, Hernicans, with the fierce and restless Samnite in the rear.
No doubt these hill tribes raided on the plain as hill tribes always do;
probably they were continually being pressed down upon it by the
migratory movements of other tribes behind them. Some of them seem
to have been in the habit of regularly swarming, like bees, under the
form of the Ver Sacrum. On the north, again, were the Etruscan hill
towns, with their lords, pirates by sea, and probably marauders by land;
for the period of a more degenerate luxury and frivolity may be
regarded as subsequent to their subjugation by the Romans; at any rate,
when they first appear upon the scene they are a conquering race. The
wars with the AEqui and Volsci have been ludicrously multiplied and
exaggerated by Livy; but even without the testimony of any historian,
we might assume that there would be wars with them and with the
other mountaineers, and also with the marauding Etruscan chiefs. At
the same time, we may be sure that, in personal strength and prowess,
the men of the plain and of the city would be inferior both to the
mountaineers and to those Etruscan chiefs whose trade was war. How
did the men of the plain and of the city manage to make up for this
inferiority, to turn the scale of force in their favour, and ultimately to
subdue both the mountaineers and Etruscans? In the conflict with the
mountaineers, something might be done by that superiority of weapons

which superior wealth would afford. But more would be done by
military organization and discipline. To military organization and
discipline the Romans accordingly learnt to submit themselves, as did
the English Parliamentarians after the experience of Edgehill, as did the
democracy of the Northern States of America after the experience of
the first campaign. At the same time the Romans learned the lesson so
momentous, and at the same time so difficult for citizen soldiers, of
drawing the line between civil and military life. The turbulent
democracy of the former, led into the field, doffed the citizen, donned
the soldier; and obeyed the orders of a commander whom as citizens
they detested, and whom when they were led back to the forum at the
end of the summer campaign they were ready again to oppose and to
impeach. No doubt all this part of the history has been immensely
embellished by the patriotic imagination, the heroic features have been
exaggerated, the harsher features softened though not suppressed. Still
it is impossible to question the general fact. The result attests the
process. The Roman legions were formed in the first instance of citizen
soldiers, who yet had been made to submit to a rigid discipline, and to
feel that in that submission lay their strength. When, to keep up the
siege of Veii, military pay was introduced, a step was taken in the
transition from a citizen soldiery to a regular army, such as the legions
ultimately became,