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The Historians' History of the World 06 [The Early Roman Empire]
- Автор: Gutenberg
- Год: 1905
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: История
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In imitation of Alexander the Great, the emperor formed six of his legions into a phalanx of thirty thousand men, to whom he gave higher pay. He also had, like that conqueror, bodies of men distinguished by gold-adorned and silver-adorned shields—chrysoaspids and argyroaspids.
The details of the war cannot be learned with any certainty. One historian says that Alexander made three divisions of his army; one of which was to enter Media through Armenia, another Persia at the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates, while the emperor was in person to lead the third through Mesopotamia, and all were to join in the enemy’s country; but that, owing to the timidity of Alexander, who loitered on the way, the second division was cut to pieces, and the first nearly all perished while retreating through Armenia in the winter. This account labours under many difficulties; for the emperor certainly triumphed on his return to Rome; and in his speech to the senate on that occasion he asserted that of 700 war elephants which were in the enemy’s array he had killed 200, and taken 300; of 1000 scythed chariots he had taken 200; and of 120,000 heavy-armed horsemen he had slain 10,000, besides taking a great number of prisoners.c Notwithstanding this report to the senate, the Romans were probably beaten in this war, though the Persians likewise suffered great loss. The latter made no further attempts on Mesopotamia for some years.a
The Germans had taken advantage of the absence of the emperor and the greater part of the troops in the East, to pass the Rhine and ravage Gaul. Alexander therefore, leaving sufficient garrisons in Syria, led home the Illyrian and other legions, and having celebrated a triumph for the Persian War at Rome, where he was received with the most abundant demonstrations of joy, he departed with a large army for the defence of Gaul. The Germans retired at his approach; he advanced to the Rhine and took up his winter quarters in the neighbourhood of Mogontiacum (Mainz), with the intention of opening the campaign beyond the river in the spring (235).
The narratives of the events of this reign are so very discordant that we cannot hope often to arrive at the real truth. In no part are they more at variance than in their account of the circumstances of the emperor’s death. We can only collect that, whether from his efforts to restore discipline, from the intrigues of Maximin, an ambitious officer who had the charge of disciplining the young troops, or from some other cause, a general discontent prevailed in the army, and that Alexander was assassinated in his tent, either by his own guards or by a party sent for the purpose by Maximin, and that his mother and several of his friends perished with him. The troops forthwith proclaimed Maximin emperor, and the senate and people of Rome, deeply lamenting the fate of the virtuous Alexander, were forced to acquiesce in the choice of the army.
Alexander had reigned thirteen years. Even the historian least partial to him acknowledges that towards his subjects his conduct was blameless, and that no bloodshed or unjust condemnations stain the annals of his reign. His fault seems to have been a certain degree of effeminacy and weakness, the consequence probably of his Syrian origin, which led to his extreme submission to his mother, against whom the charges of avarice and meanness are not perhaps wholly unfounded.[45]
Dion Cassius, whose history ends with this reign, gives the following view of the numbers and disposition of the legions, at this period. Of the twenty-five which were formed by Augustus, only nineteen remained, the rest having been broken or distributed through the others; but the emperors, from Nero to Severus inclusive, had formed thirteen new ones, and the whole now amounted to thirty-two legions. Of these, three were in Britain, one in Upper and two in Lower Germany, one in Italy, one in Spain, one in Numidia, one in Arabia, two in Palestine, one in Phœnicia, two in Syria, two in Mesopotamia, two in Cappadocia, two in Lower and one in Upper Mœsia, two in Dacia, and four in Pannonia, one in Noricum, and one in Rætia. He does not tell us where the two remaining ones were quartered, neither does he give the number of men in a legion at this time, but it is conjectured to have been five thousand.c
RENAN’S CHARACTERISATION OF THE PERIOD
[180-235 A.D.]
On principles less disastrous than those of unbridled military despotism, the empire might have survived the ruin of the Roman spirit in the death of Marcus Aurelius, might have given peace to Christianity a century earlier and have avoided the streams of blood shed to no purpose by Decius and Diocletian. The part of the Roman aristocracy was played out; after having worn folly threadbare in the first century, it had worn virtue threadbare in the second. But the hidden forces of the great Mediterranean confederacy were not exhausted. Thus, after the downfall of the political edifice founded on the sovereignty of the family of Augustus, a provincial dynasty, that of the Flavians, was found to restore the empire, even as after the downfall of the edifice built up by the adoptions of the Roman aristocracy, there were found provincials, Orientals and Syrians, to restore the great association in which all men found peace and profit. Septimius Severus did, without moral grandeur but not without glory, what Vespasian had done.
It is true that the representatives of this new dynasty are not to be compared to the great emperors of the second century. Even Alexander Severus, who equals Antoninus and Marcus in kindliness, is very inferior to them in intelligence and greatness of soul. The principles of the government are detestable; men outbid one another for the favour of the legions; a price is set on mutiny; none approaches the soldier except with purse in hand. Military despotism never took a more shameless form; but military despotism can be long-lived.
Side by side with hideous spectacles, under the Syrian emperors, what reforms do we find! What progress in legislation! What a day was that when, under Caracalla, all free men dwelling within the empire attained equal rights!
We must not exaggerate the advantages offered by such equality; yet in politics words are never wholly void of meaning. Many excellent things had been inherited. The philosophers of the school of Marcus Aurelius had disappeared, but their place was taken by the masters of jurisprudence. Papinian, Ulpian, Paul, Gaius, Modestinus, Florentinus, Marcian, during years of execrable evil, created masterpieces and actually brought the law of the future into being. The Syrian emperors, though far inferior to Trajan and to the Antonines as far as political traditions are concerned, inasmuch as they were not Romans and had none of the Roman prejudices, often give proof of an openness of mind which would have been impossible to the great emperors of the second century, all of whom were intensely conservative. They permitted and even encouraged colleges or syndicates. They went to extreme lengths in this matter, and they would have organised the trade guilds as castes with a distinctive garb. They flung the doors of the empire wide open. One of them, that noble and pathetic figure Alexander Severus, the son of Mamæa, almost equalled in his plebeian goodness the patrician virtues of the great age; the loftiest ideas pale before the honest effusions of his heart.
It was in religion above all that these Syrian emperors inaugurated a liberality of mind and a tolerance unknown before.[46] The Syrian women of Emesa, Julia Domna, Julia Mæsa, Julia Mamæa, Julia Soæmias, beautiful, intelligent, venturous to the point of utopianism, are hampered by no tradition or conventionality. They dared to do what no Roman woman had ever done; they entered the senate, took part in its deliberations, and practically governed the empire, dreaming of Semiramis and Nitocris. It was a thing that such a woman as Faustina would not have done for all her frivolity; she would have been checked by tact, by the sense of absurdity, by the rules of good Roman society. The Syrian women hesitated at nothing. They had a senate of women, which enacted every sort of absurdity. The Roman religion seemed to them cold and meaningless. They had no family reasons for attachment to it, and being more in harmony, imaginatively, with Christianity than with Italian paganism, they delighted in the tales of the travels of gods upon the earth. Philostratus enchanted them with his Apollonius; perhaps they had a secret leaning towards Christianity.