Lectures and Essays | Page 7

with its standing discipline of the camp; and that the
measure should have been possible is another proof that Rome was a
great city, with a well-supplied treasury, not a collection of mud huts.
No doubt the habit of military discipline reacted on the political
character of the people, and gave it the strength and self-control which
were so fatally wanting in the case of Florence.
The line was drawn, under the pressure of a stern necessity, between
civil and military life, and between the rights and duties of each. The
power of the magistrate, jealously limited in the city, was enlarged to
absolutism for the preservation of discipline in the field. But the
distinction between the king or magistrate and the general, and between
the special capacities required for the duties of each, is everywhere of
late growth. We may say the same of departmental distinctions
altogether. The executive, the legislative, the judicial power, civil
authority and military command, all lie enfolded in the same primitive
germ. The king, or the magistrate who takes his place, is expected to

lead the people in war as well as to govern them in peace. In European
monarchies this idea still lingers, fortified no doubt by the personal
unwillingness of the kings to let the military power go out of their
hands. Nor in early times is the difference between the qualifications of
a ruler and those of a commander so great as it afterwards became; the
business of the State is simple, and force of character is the main
requisite in both cases. Annual consulships must have been fatal to
strategical experience, while, on the other hand, they would save the
Republic from being tied to an unsuccessful general. But the storms of
war which broke on Rome from all quarters soon brought about the
recognition of special aptitude for military command in the
appointment of dictators. As to the distinction between military and
naval ability, it is of very recent birth: Blake, Prince Rupert, and Monk
were made admirals because they had been successful as generals, just
as Hannibal was appointed by Antiochus to the command of a fleet.
At Preston Pans, as before at Killiecrankie, the line of the Hanoverian
regulars was broken by the headlong charge of the wild clans, for
which the regulars were unprepared. Taught by the experience of
Preston Pans, the Duke of Cumberland at Culloden formed in three
lines, so as to repair a broken front. The Romans in like manner formed
in three lines-- _hastati_, _principes_, and _triarii_--evidently with the
same object. Our knowledge of the history of Roman tactics does not
enable us to say exactly at what period this formation began to
supersede the phalanx, which appears to have preceded it, and which is
the natural order of half-disciplined or imperfectly armed masses, as we
see in the case of the army formed by Philip out of the Macedonian
peasantry, and again in the case of the French Revolutionary columns.
We cannot say, therefore, whether this formation in three lines is in any
way traceable to experience dearly bought in wars with Italian
highlanders, or to a lesson taught by the terrible onset of the Gaul.
Again, the punctilious care in the entrenchment of the camp, even for a
night's halt, which moved the admiration of Pyrrhus and was a material
part of Roman tactics, was likely to be inculcated by the perils to which
a burgher army would be exposed in carrying on war under or among
hills where it would be always liable to the sudden attack of a swift,
sure-footed, and wily foe. The habit of carrying a heavy load of
palisades on the march would be a part of the same necessity.

Even from the purely military point of view, then, the She-wolf and the
Twins seem to us not appropriate emblems of Roman greatness. A
better frontispiece for historians of Rome, if we mistake not, would be
some symbol of the patroness of the lowlands and their protectress
against the wild tribes of the highlands. There should also be something
to symbolize the protectress of Italy against the Gauls, whose irruptions
Rome, though defeated at Allia, succeeded ultimately in arresting and
hurling back, to the general benefit of Italian civilization which, we
may be sure, felt very grateful to her for that service, and remembered
it when her existence was threatened by Hannibal, with Gauls in his
army. Capua, though not so well situated for the leadership of Italy,
might have played the part of Rome; but the plain which she
commanded, though very rich, was too small, and too closely overhung
by the fatal hills of the Samnite, under whose dominion she fell. Rome
had space to organize a strong lowland resistance to the marauding
highland powers.