The World's Greatest Books [Volumes 1-15, 17-20]

In the provinces, the Spanish natives revolted, and were only repressed after severe fighting. In Greece, Asia and Africa, the Roman rule gave neither freedom nor strong government. In Africa, the disturbances led to the wiping out of Carthage; in Greece to the complete subjection of the dependent states; in the Far East, a new Parthian power arose under Mithridates. The Mediterranean was allowed to be infested by pirates. Revolution was at hand. Politics had become reduced to a process of intrigue for office emoluments, involving a pandering to the city mob for its suffrages.

II.--The Revolution

Socially, the most patent evil was the total disappearance of the free agricultural class, the absorption of all the land into huge estates under slave labour. The remedy proposed by Tiberius Gracchus was the partial state resumption of land and its re-allotment. He adopted unconstitutional methods for carrying his proposals, and was murdered in a riot led by the oligarchs. Appeals to the Roman populace were not, unfortunately, appeals to the Roman nation.

His brother, Gaius, deliberately designed a revolution. He proposed to work through the antagonism of the aristocrats and the wealthy non-senatorial equestrian order; and by concentrating power in the hands of the tribunate, hitherto checked by the restrictions on re-election. In effect, he meant to destroy the oligarchy by making the Tribune a perpetual dictator, and thus to carry through social reforms; to establish also legal equality first for the Italians, then for the provinces also. But these reforms were not particularly attractive to the city mob, and the other side could play the demagogue. The condition of Cæsarism is the control of physical force; Gaius Gracchus fell because he had not that essential control. The oligarchy remained supreme. The plans of Gracchus for planting colonies and distributing allotments were nullified.

The evils of slave labour multiplied, and issued in servile insurrections. In Numidia, the able Masimissa had been succeeded by Micipsa. On Micipsa's death, the rule was usurped by his illegitimate nephew Jugurtha, whose story has been told by Sallust. The war was at least terminated less by the low-born general in command, Marius, than his brilliant lieutenant Sulla. But Marius re-organised the army on the basis which was to make a military despotism practicable, as it made a professional instead of a citizen army.

But now a new foe appears; the first Teutonic (not Celtic) hordes of the Cimbri and Teutones; to meet with an overwhelming check at the hands of Marius at Aquæ Sextiæ and Vercellæ. The successful soldier allied himself with the popular leader Saturninus; the programme of Gaius Gracchus was resuscitated. But Marius, a political incapable, separated from the demagogues, and by helping to crush them, effaced himself. Livius Drusus attempted to carry out the Gracchan social reform, with the senate instead of the tribunate as the controlling power; the senatorial party themselves wrecked his schemes, and the antagonistic power of the equestrian order was advanced.

But the immediate outcome was the revolt of the Italians, the socii (whence the name social war). They were not citizens, not on an equal footing with the citizens before the law. The revolt was suppressed, but the legions were completely out of hand. The attempt of Sulpicius to head the reform movement was answered by Sulla, who for the first time led a Roman army against Rome, crushed Sulpicius, prescribed some of his adherents, and placed the power of the senate on a stronger footing by legal enactment. Then he went to the East, to conduct the war against Mithridates.

While Sulla was conducting his operations, military and diplomatic, with skill and success in the East, his arrangements at Rome had left discontent and disappointment seething. There was another revolution, led by Cinna, Marius and Sertorius; it mastered Rome. Marius spilt seas of blood, but soon died. For three years Cinna was supreme, but he had no constructive policy.

But now Sulla had finished his work in the East. He was returning at the head of a body of veterans devoted to him; and his diplomacy won over half Italy to his side. The struggle with the revolutionary government was not greatly prolonged, and it was decisive.

In plain terms, the Roman constitution had gone utterly to wreck; Sulla was in something of the same position as Oliver Cromwell. He had to reconstruct under conditions which made a constitutional restoration impracticable; but his control of the efficient military force gave him the necessary power. That any system introduced must be arbitrary and find its main sanction in physical force--that it should partake of terrorism--was inevitable.

Sulla obtained the formal conferment on himself of absolute power. He began by applying this rule of terror not vindictively, but with impersonal mercilessness, against the lives and property of the opposition. In the constitution which he promulgated the senatorial body was alone recognised as a privileged class; the senate itself was increased, it recovered full control of the judiciary and of legislation; no power was left of cancelling membership. The tribunician power was curtailed.