The Historians' History of the World 05 [The Roman Republic]

[81-79 B.C.]

Slowly and with many a painful struggle the Roman commonwealth had outgrown the narrow limits of a rustic municipality. The few hundred families which formed the original nucleus of her citizenship, and which in her earliest and simplest days had sufficed to execute all the functions of her government, had been compelled to incorporate allies and rivals in their own body, to enlarge their views, and to expand their institutions. The main object of Sulla’s policy was to revive at least the spirit of the old restrictions. The old families themselves had perished almost to a man; he replaced them by a newer growth; but he strove to pare away the accretions of ages, and restore the government of the vast empire of Rome to a small section of her children. The attempt was blind and bigoted; it was not less futile than unjust. It contravened the essential principle of national growth; while the career of conquest, to which the Romans devoted themselves, required the fullest expansion and the most perfect freedom of development.

Nevertheless the legislation of Sulla was undoubtedly supported by a vast mass of existing prejudice. He threw himself into the ideas of his time, as far as they were interpreted by history, by tradition, and by religious usage. The attempt to enlarge the limits of the constitution was in fact opposed to every acknowledged principle of polity. It was regarded equally by its opponents and its promoters as anomalous and revolutionary. It had as yet no foundation in argument, or in any sense of right, as right was then understood. Society at Rome was in a highly artificial state; and Sulla with many of his ablest contemporaries, mistook for the laws of nature the institutions of an obsolete and forgotten expediency. But nature was carrying on a great work, and proved too strong for art. Ten years sufficed to overthrow the whole structure of this reactionary legislation, and to launch the republic once more upon the career of growth and development. The champions of a more liberal policy sprang up in constant succession, and contributed, perhaps unconsciously, to the great work of union and comprehension, which was now rapidly in progress. The spirit of isolation which had split Greece and Italy into hundreds of separate communities was about to give way to a general yearning for social and moral unity. The nations were to be trained by the steady development of the Roman administration.

But though Sulla’s main policy was thus speedily overthrown, he had not lived in vain. As dictator he wasted his strength in attempting what, if successful, would have destroyed his country; but as proconsul he had saved her. The tyranny of the Roman domination had set the provinces in a blaze. Mithridates had fanned the flame. Greece and Asia had revolted. The genius of the king of Pontus might have consolidated an empire, such as Xerxes might have envied, on either shore of the Ægean Sea. But at this crisis of her fate, hardly less imminent than when Hannibal was wresting from her allies and subjects within the Alps, Rome had confided her fortunes to the prowess of Sulla. The great victory of Chæronea checked the dissolution of her empire. The invader was hurled back across the Ægean; the cities of Greece returned reluctantly to their obedience, never more to be tempted to renounce it. Sulla followed Mithridates into Asia; one by one he recovered the provinces of the republic. He bound his foe by treaties to abstain from fomenting their discontents. He left his officers to enforce submission to his decrees, and quartered the armies of Rome upon the wretched populations of the East. The pressing danger of the moment was averted, though it took twenty years more to subdue the power of Mithridates, and reduce Asia to passive submission. Rome was relieved from the last of her foreign invaders; and this was the great work of Sulla, which deserved to immortalise his name in her annals.[100]

Nevertheless this rolling back of the tide of aggression, and the return of the legions of the republic to the limits of her former conquests, had no effect in healing the internal sickness of which the irritation of the provinces was only symptomatic. The triumph of her arms and the sense of security it engendered only served to redouble her oppressions and to aggravate the misery of her subjects. The course of events will lead us on some future occasion to trace the remains of resentment and hatred towards Rome, which lingered long in some regions of Italy itself: but for the most part the Italians were now satisfied; they were content to regard the city of Romulus as their own metropolis; and while they enjoyed the fruits of her wide-wasting domination, gradually learned to take a pride in her name. But beyond the Ionian and the Tyrrhenian seas the same ardent vows were formed for enfranchisement which had precipitated upon Rome the Marsians and the Samnites; in more than one quarter the old struggle of the Social Wars was about to be renewed on wider and more distant theatres: but the elements of strife were now more complicated than before; the parties engaged were more thoroughly alien from each other; the hostility of Rome’s new enemies was the more inveterate as they had less sympathy with her institutions, and were ambitious of overthrowing rather than of sharing them. The second period of the civil wars of Rome opens with the revolt of the Iberians in the west, and the maritime devastations of the pirates in the east.