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The Historians' History of the World 05 [The Roman Republic]
- Автор: Gutenberg
- Год: 1905
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: История
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The rights and privileges of these Latin colonies are only known to us as they are found at a later period of the republic under the name Latinitas, or the Right of Latium (Jus Latii). This right, at the later time we speak of, we know to have consisted in the power of obtaining the full rights of a Roman burgess, but in a limited and peculiar manner. Any citizen of a Latin community, whether one of the free cities of Latium or a Latin colony, was allowed to emigrate to Rome and be enrolled in one of the Roman tribes, on two conditions: first, that he had held a magistracy in his native town: secondly, that he left a representative of his family in that native town. Thus was formed that large body of half-Roman citizens throughout Italy, who are so well known to readers of Livy under the appellation of “the Latin name.” Socii et nomen Latinum—the allies and the Latin name—was the technical expression for all those Italian communities who were bound to supply soldiers for her armies.
Besides the mass of the Italian communities which were in a condition of greater or less dependence upon Rome,—the prefectures in a state of absolute subjection, the colonies bound by ties of national feeling and interest, the municipal towns by articles of alliance,—there remain to be noticed, fourthly, the cities which remained wholly independent of Rome, but bound to her by treaties of equal alliance. Of the Latin cities, Tibur and Præneste alone were in this condition; in Campania, most of the cities, till, after the Hannibalic War, Capua and others were reduced to the condition of prefectures; of the Hellenic cities in the south, Neapolis, Rhegium, and others; in Umbria, Camerium; in Etruria, Iguvium; with all the cities of the Frentanians. But as Roman power increased, most of these communities were reduced to the condition of simple municipal towns.
Whatever is known of the internal constitution of these various communities belongs to later times, when by the Julian law they all obtained the Roman franchise, and became part and parcel of the Roman state. There can, however, be little doubt that in the colonies a constitution was adopted similar to that of Rome herself. The colonists formed a kind of patriciate or aristocracy, and the heads of their leading families constituted a senate. There were two chief magistrates, called duumviri, representing the consuls, to whom (in the more important towns) were added one or two men to fulfil the duties of censor and quæstor. In course of time similar constitutions were introduced into the municipal towns also.
Thus, by placing the Italian cities in every possible relation to herself, from real independence to complete subjection, and by planting colonies, some with full Roman rights, some with a limited power of obtaining these rights, Rome wove her net of sovereignty over the peninsula, and covered every part with its entangling meshes. The policy of Rome, as has been said, may be summed up in the two words—isolation and self-government.c
FOOTNOTES
[44] [Mommsenb thinks of Pyrrhus as “simply a military adventurer.” He finds his dream of western empire, “analogous in greatness and boldness to the idea which led Alexander over the Hellespont.” But he finds a vast difference between the chances of success, seeing in the disorganised and independent Italian states “poor material for a united realm.” In all points the plan of the Macedonian appears as a feasible, that of the Epirot as an impracticable, enterprise; the former as the completion of a great historical task, the latter as a remarkable blunder. And yet we must not forget that we look at these attempts from the viewpoint of result not of purpose, and to his contemporaries the conquest of Italy would have seemed easier, if less worth while, than the then apparently impossible dream of Alexander.]
[45] Hence the distinction between Civitates Federatæ and Liberæ. All federate communities were free, but not all free communities were federate.]
[46] [Roman colonies were essentially similar to the cleruchies of Athens.]
CHAPTER X. THE FIRST PUNIC WAR
Carthage clears the Alps, Rome traverses the seas, the two peoples, personified in two men Hannibal and Scipio, wrestle and are desperate to terminate the struggle. ’Tis a duel à outrance, a fight to the death. Rome totters, she utters a cry of anguish: Hannibal ad portas! But she rises again, uses the limits of her strength in a last blow, throws herself on Carthage and effaces her from the world.—Victor Hugo.
A taste of blood whets the appetite of a nation no less than of an animal. It is notorious that the love of power grows with its acquisition. It was inevitable then that the Romans, after beating off their eastern enemy, should turn their eyes more and more jealously towards their one remaining rival in the west—namely, Carthage. A certain amount of antagonism there had doubtless been all along between Rome and Carthage, but there was a long time during which the Italian city had hardly achieved strength enough to excite a real jealousy on the part of a community of such recognised power as Carthage. And even now there was no possibility that Rome could claim to compete with her rival on the sea. Inheriting the traditions of her mother city, Tyre, Carthage was pre-eminently a commercial city. She occupied that pre-eminence of the western Mediterranean that Tyre so long held in the East, and she was little disposed to accept without a struggle the rivalry of a people of another land and race. It was inevitable then that a war to the death must sooner or later determine the question of mastery so soon as Rome had achieved a degree of power which enforced her recognition as an actual rival of Carthage. The contest was precipitated—as might have been expected—by the condition of things in Sicily, an island which lay intermediate between the territories of the two powers, and thus almost of necessity became a bone of contention between them. In the early days, indeed, it was the Greeks and Carthaginians who disputed over Sicily, and perpetually quarrelled there, but now after the death of Agathocles, the powerful tyrant of Syracuse, and the defeat of Pyrrhus, it became clear that Syracuse and the other Greek cities of Sicily must look for aid in future to Rome rather than to Greece. But the acceptance of such an alliance on the part of Rome virtually implied war with Carthage, and such a war broke out actively only a few years after the expulsion of Pyrrhus from Italy. It required indeed a series of three most memorable wars, extending over a period of more than a century, finally to decide the fate of Carthage.
The first of these wars—in some sense perhaps the most important, yet as regards its results by far the least striking in itself—lasted some twenty-three years. It was fought out largely in Sicily itself by the Romans who were, for the most part, successful and in the end entirely victorious; and on the sea, where the fleets of the Romans were for a long time quite unable to compete with their rivals; the same dogged pertinacity, however, that had made Rome mistress of Italy and that had brought about the final triumph over Pyrrhus, stood them in good stead in the new effort to create a powerful navy—an effort which was at last crowned with such complete success that in the final decisive battle at the Ægatian Islands, the fleet of Carthage was entirely destroyed and dispersed. At last Carthage sued for peace, acknowledging the supremacy of Rome in Sicily and giving up all claim to that island.