The Evolution of States Part 2

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The effect of continuous foreign war in frustrating democracy is here plain. On the one hand, the peasant-farmers are reduced to debt and slavery by their inability to farm their lands in war-time, while the patrician's lands are worked by his slaves. On the other hand, their distress is met by a share in the lands conquered; and after the soldiers are allowed pay (406 B.C.) they are more and more ready to join in conquest. Not only is popular discontent put off by the prospect of foreign plunder, but the perpetual state of aggressive war, while tending first to pauperise most of the small cultivators who make the army, breeds a new public spirit on a low plane, a sinister fraternity of conquest. Ethics must needs worsen throughout the State when the primitive instinct of strife developed into a policy of plunder; and worsened ethics means a positive weakening of a society's total strength. There is no lesson that men are slower to learn--and this naturally, because they see the success of unjust conquest--yet there is no truth easier to prove from history. Early Rome was strong as against strong enemies, because not only were its people hardily bred, but the majority were on the whole satisfied that they had just laws: the reciprocal sense of recognised _rights_ sustained public spirit at the possible maximum. But the rights are thoroughly selfish at best; and it is the diversion of their selfishness to the task of continuous conquest that "saves" the community from early dissolution, preserving it for the life of dominion, which in turn destroys the old forces of cohesion, and leaves a community fit only for subjection to a military autocracy. The society of mutual selfish rights has a measure of cohesion of its own, up to the point of conflict between the "haves" and the "have-nots." An outwardly similar cohesion can, indeed, be sustained for a time by mere concurrence in piracy; but it lies in the very nature of society that union so engineered, cohesion so secured, is fleeting.

Men whose main discipline is the practice of tyranny over aliens become simply incapable of strict reciprocity towards kin, and there must ensue either internecine strife or the degradation of the weaker elements, or a sequence of these results.

This is what happened in Rome. One of the first political signs of the contagion of the life of rapine in the later Republic is the growth of public bribery as a means to further wealth. Administrative posts being the chief of these means, candidates for them set about buying votes in the modern manner.[46] As early as 432 B.C. the law against canva.s.sing by candidates[47] (_lex de ambitu_) suggests the recognition of electoral corruption; and later there followed a whole series of futile vetoes--futile because the social conditions grew always morally worse.

The _lex aemilia Baebia_ (182 B.C.) forbade all money gifts by candidates; and twenty-three years later another law decreed that offenders should be exiled. This also failing, there followed the _leges tabellariae_, establis.h.i.+ng the ballot (139-137). Still the disease persisted, because there was no stop now possible to the career of conquest, which had undermined the very instincts whereon law depends; and on the treacherous struggle for place and pelf by way of bribery there supervened the direct grapple over the ill-gotten gains. The Roman ruling cla.s.s had evolved into a horde of filibustering fortune-hunters, as did the Greeks under and after Alexander; and the political sequels of despotism and civil war were substantially the same.

The process was gradual, and the phenomena are at times apt to delude us. When a political machinery was set up that conduced to systematic and extending warfare in which the commonwealth was often at stake, the community had a new albeit fatal bond of cohesion, and the destructive or repulsive energies for generations found a wide field outside of the State. It is when the aristocratic Republic, succeeding finally in the long struggle with Carthage for the wealth of Sicily and Spain and the control of the Mediterranean, has further overrun Greece and pretty well exhausted the immediate fields of conquest, that the forces of repulsion again begin to work destructively within the body politic itself, and men and cla.s.ses become the fools of their animosities. The wars of faction, the popular propaganda of the Gracchi, the murderous strifes of Marius and Sulla, the rivalries of Pompey and Cra.s.sus, Conservatives and Democrats, Caesar and Pompey, the pandemonium on Caesar's death, all in turn represent the renewed operation within the State of the crude energies of cohesion and strife which had been so long employed in foreign war. And the strife is progressively worse, because the materials are more complex and more corrupt. The aristocracy are more arrogant and hardened, the free farmer cla.s.s has in large part disappeared, and the populace are more debauched.[48]

The perpetual wars had multiplied slaves; and the slaves added a new and desperate element to the social problem. It was the proof of the fatal lack in Rome of vital ethical feeling--or, let us say, of social science--that this deadly iniquity was never effectually recoiled from, or even impugned as it had been, before Aristotle, among the more highly evolved of the Greeks.[49] As wealth and luxury, pride and power acc.u.mulated, the usage of slave labour spread ever further and ate ever deeper into the population, brutalising alike the enslaved and the free.

It was doubtless a partial recognition of this that motived, in Cicero's day, the large number of affranchis.e.m.e.nts of slaves (Wallon, _Hist. de l'Esclavage_, ii, 409). But fresh enslavements went on; the amelioration consisted in the brevity of the period of enslavement in cases of good conduct. And the evil was in the main a product of conquest. It is fairly established by Dureau de la Malle (_econ. polit. des Romains_, 1840, vol. i, liv. ii, ch. 2) that down to the second Punic War Roman slaves were few. They would be for the most part _nexi_, victims of debt. As conquests multiplied prisoners, the cla.s.s increased rapidly. Broadly speaking, the house servants were all slaves, as were the bulk of the shepherds in the great _latifundia_, the crews of the galleys, and many of the artisans. The total number has doubtless been greatly exaggerated, both in ancient and modern times, as has been the population of the imperial city. Athenaeus is responsible for many wild estimates. (Cp. Letronne, as cited by Dureau, liv. ii, ch. 4.) Dureau arrives by careful calculation at an estimate of an Italian population of some five millions about the year 529 A.U.C., of whom some two and three quarter millions were free and some two and a quarter millions were slaves or _metaeci_, aliens without political rights (i, 296). The population of Rome as late as Aurelian he puts at between 500,000 and 600,000 (i, 368). (See Prof. Bury's note in his ed. of Gibbon, iii, 308, for different views. Gibbon, Bunsen, and Hodgkin put the figure at about a million.) The exact proportion of slaves to free is not of the essence of the problem. A society with nine slaves for every eleven free was sufficiently committed to degeneration.

But the fatality of war was as irresistible as the fatality of plebeian degradation; and the collapse of the slave war in Sicily (132), and the political movement of the Gracchi, alongside of the new warlike triumphs in Spain and Southern Gaul (121--the first great successes since the fall of Carthage), ill.u.s.trate the general principle that a ruling cla.s.s or house may always reckon on checking domestic criticism and popular self-a.s.sertion by turning the animal energies of the people to animal strife with another nation, in which case union correlates with strife.

Wars imply comrades.h.i.+p and the putting aside of domestic strife for the time being; and a war with Illyria was made the pretext for suspending the operation of the new land law pa.s.sed by the elder Gracchus when the younger later sought to carry it out. The triumphs of Marius, again, over Jugurtha and the Cimbri availed nothing to unify the parties in the State, or to secure his own. In democratising the army by drawing on a demoralised _demos_, he did but make it a more facile tool for the general, a thing more detached from the body politic.[50] The tendency of all cla.s.ses in Rome to unite against the claims of the outside Italians was from the first a stumbling-block to the democrats within Rome; and the final identification of the popular interest, in the period of Marius and Sulla, with an anti-Roman policy among the Marians, gave to Sulla, strong in the prestige of recent conquest, the position of advantage, apart from his own strength. Further, as Montesquieu very justly notes, civil wars turn an entire nation into soldiers, and give it a formidable advantage over its enemies when it regains unity.[51]

But this again is only for a time; there is no enduring society where there is no general sense of reciprocal justice among free men; and systematic militarism and plunder are the negation of moral reciprocity.

One partial exception, it is true, must be made. In the early days of the Republic the poor soldier stood to lose his farm by his patriotism.

Soon the fighters had to be paid; and from the day of Marius onwards Roman commanders perforce provided for their veterans--so often their accomplices in the violation of their country's laws and liberties. The provision was made on the one hand by donations from the loot, on the other by grants of land taken from others, it might be in Italy itself.

Sulla so rewarded his sworders; the triumvirs took the land of eighteen Italian towns to divide among their legionaries.[52] To the end the emperors had constantly to provide for their time-expired men by confiscations. Thus did empire pay for its instrument.

-- 4

The animal energies themselves, in time, are affected by domestic conditions; and when Caesar comes on the scene Rome is visibly far on the way to a state of things such as had long before appeared in older civilisations[53]--a state of things commonly but rather loosely called degenerate, in which the animal energies are grown less robust, and the life therefore in some respects more civilised. Such a course had been run in Italy long before the rise of Rome, notably in Etruria, where, after a conquest of aborigines by a small body of invaders,[54] who were in touch with early Greek culture, the civilisation remains at that archaic stage while Greek civilisation continues to progress.[55] There, with a small aristocracy lording it over a people of serfs,[56] progress of all kinds was arrested, and even the religion of the conquerors a.s.similated to that of the aborigines.[57] In the Rome of Caesar we see, after much fluctuation, with a more complex and less enfeebled structure of population, the beginnings of the same fixation of cla.s.ses; while, at the same time, there has been such psychological variation as can begin to give new and ostensibly higher channels to the immanent forces of union and strife. This is the social condition that, given the required military evolution, above all lends itself to imperialism or absolute monarchy; which system in turn best maintains itself by a policy of conquest, so employing the animal energies and keeping up the cohesive force of militarist pride throughout all cla.s.ses. Even now, of course, in a semi-enslaved populace, as in a slave population pure and simple,[58] there were possibilities of insurrection; and it was at length empirically politic for the emperors to give the populace its daily bread and its daily games, as well as to keep it charmed with the spectacle of conquest. The expedient of doles of food did not at once condemn itself by dangerously multiplying mouths, because, although it was only in the upper cla.s.ses that men commonly refused to marry and have legitimate children, population was now restrained by the preventive checks of vice, city life, and wholesale abortion,[59] which are so much more effective--alike against child and mother[60]--than the random resort to infanticide, though that too had greatly increased.[61]

On the other hand, as the field of practicable conquest again approaches exhaustion and no sufficiently strong rival arises to conquer the conquerors, nothing can hinder that people of all cla.s.ses, having no ideals tending to social and intellectual advance, and no sufficient channel for the instinct of union in the politics of the autocracy, shall find some channels of a new kind.[62] These are opened in due course, and take the shape especially of religious combinations or churches. Such modes had appeared even in the earlier stages of civic disintegration, when the semi-private or sectarian cults had begun to compete successfully with the public or civic. They did so by appealing more freshly and directly to the growths of emotional feeling (the outcome in part of physiological modification)[63] which no longer found outlet in primary forms, such as warfare and primitive revelry. After having themselves consented in times of panic to the introduction of several cults in the name of the public interest, the ruling cla.s.ses, instinctively conservative by the law of their existence, take fright at the startling popularity of the unofficial Bacchic mysteries, and decide to stamp out the movement.[64] But the attempt is futile, the causal conditions remaining; and soon Judaism, Osirianism, Mithraism, the wors.h.i.+ps of Attis, Adonis, Bacchus, Isis, Serapis, all more or less bound up with divination and sorcery, make way in the disintegrating body politic.[65] The wheel of social evolution had, so to speak, "gone full circle" since the first Roman _curia_, the basis of the State, subsisted as groups with their special _sacra_, finding in these their reason for cohering. Decadent Rome, all other principles of subordinate cohesion having been worked out, resolves itself once more into groups similarly motived. But the principle is newly conditioned, and the _sacra_ now begin the struggle for existence among themselves. The rise of Christianity is simply the success of a system which, on a good economic foundation, copied from that of the Jewish synagogues, a.s.similates the main attractions of similar wors.h.i.+ps, while availing itself of exoteric and democratic as well as esoteric methods. It thus necessarily gains ground among the mult.i.tude, rich as well as poor;[66]

and its ultimate acceptance by the autocrat was due to the very exclusiveness which at first made it intolerable. Once diffused widely enough to set up the largest religious organisation in the Empire, it became the best possible instrument of centralisation and control, and as such it was accepted and employed.[67]

And now again we see how inevitably the force of attraction correlates with the force of repulsion. The new channels of the spirit of union, being dug not by reason but by ignorance, become new channels for the reverse flow of the spirit of strife; and as sectarian zeal spreads, in the absence of openings, good or bad, for public spirit, there arise new forms of domestic hate and struggle. Crude religious fervours, excluding, or arising in lack of, the play of the saner and higher forms of thought and feeling, beget crude antipathies;[68] and Christianity leads back to b.l.o.o.d.y strifes and seditions such as had not been seen since the fall of the Republic. There is not intellectuality enough to raise men above this new superinduced barbarism of ignorant instinct; half of the old Christendom, disintegrated like the old politics, is overrun by a more robust barbarism that adopts a simpler creed; and the new barbaric Christendom exhibits in its turn all the modes of operation of the biological forces that had been seen in the old.

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Thus far we have considered Roman evolution in terms of a moral estimate of the reactions of cla.s.ses. But lest we lose sight of the principle of total causation, it is fitting to restate the process in terms of that conception, thus explaining it non-morally. We may view Rome, to begin with, as a case of the unique aggrandis.e.m.e.nt of a State in virtue of fit conditions and inst.i.tutions. Thus (1) the comparatively uncommercial situation of the early Latins, leaving them, beyond cattle-breeding and agriculture, no occupation save war for surplus energy, and no readier way of acquiring wealth;[69] (2) the physical collocation of a group of seven defensive hills, so close that they must be held by a federated group;[70] (3) the ethnic collocation of a set of tribe groups of nearly equal vigour and ardour, strengthening each other's sinews by constant struggling; (4) the creation (not prescient, but purely as a provision against kings.h.i.+p) of the peculiar inst.i.tution of the annual consulate,[71] securing a perpetuity of motive to conquest and a continuous flow of administrative energy;[72] (5) the peculiar need, imposed by this very habit of all-round warfare, for accommodation between the ruling and ruled cla.s.ses, and for the safeguarding of the interests of the latter by laws and franchises; (6) the central position of Rome in Italy, enabling her to subdue it piecemeal; and finally (7) the development by all these means of a specialist aristocracy, habitually trained to administration[73]--all these genetic conditions combined to build up the most remarkable military empire the world has ever seen. They obtrude, it is clear, half of the explanation of the fact that the Romans rose to empire where the much more early civilised Greek cities of Italy did not.

Of the latter fact we still receive the old explanation that it came of "the habit, which had ever been the curse of h.e.l.lenism, of jealous separation and frequent war between town and town, as well as internal feuds in the several cities themselves."[74] But this is clearly no _vera causa_, as these symptoms are duplicated in the history of Rome itself. The determining forces must, then, be looked for in the special conditions. The Greeks, indeed, brought with them the tradition of the separate City-State; but just as the cities remained independent in Greece by reason of natural conditions,[75] so the Greek cities of Italy remained isolated and stationary at a certain strength, because their basis and way of life were commercial, so that while they restricted each other's growth or dominance they were in times of peace mutually nutritive. They wanted customers, not plunder. For the Romans plunder was the first social need after agriculture, and as they began they continued. When Jugurtha learned that anything could be had of the Romans for gold, he had but read an open secret.

Of course, the functions that were originally determined by external conditions came in time to be initial causes--the teeth and claws, so to speak, fixing the way of life for the body politic. The upper-cla.s.s Romans became, as it were, the experts, the specialists of war and empire and administration. Until they became wholly demoralised by habitual plunder, they showed, despite their intense primeval superst.i.tion of citizens.h.i.+p,[76] a degree of sagacity in the conciliation of their defeated rivals which was a main cause of their being able to hold out against Hannibal, and which contrasts markedly with the oppressive and self-defeating policy of imperial Carthage, Athens, and Sparta. Their tradition in part was still that of conquering herdsmen, not wholly turned into mere exploiters of humanity. Pitted against any monarch, they were finally invincible, because a still-growing cla.s.s supplied their administrators, as the swarming provinces supplied their soldiers, and because for all alike war meant plunder and new lands, as well as glory. Pitted against a republic like Carthage, even when its armies were led by a man of genius, they were still insuppressible, inasmuch as Carthage was a community of traders employing mercenaries, where Rome was a community in arms, producing generals as Carthage produced merchants. Mithridates failed in turn, as Hannibal failed. The genius of one commander, exploiting pa.s.sive material, could not avail against the acc.u.mulated faculty for organisation in the still self-renewing Roman patriciate.[77]

Carthage had, in fact, preceded Rome on the line of the evolution of cla.s.s egoism. Herself an expression of the pressure of the social problem in the older Semitic world, she began as a colony, staved off domestic strife by colonies, by empire, and by doles,[78] and was already near the economic stage reached only centuries later by the Roman Empire. Save for Rome, her polity might have endured on the imperialist basis for centuries; but, as it was, it was socially exhausted relatively to the task and the danger, depending as it did on hired foreign troops and coerced allies. It is idle to speak, as men still do, of Hannibal's stay in Capua as a fatal mistake.[79] Had Hannibal taken Rome, the ultimate triumph of the Romans would have been just as certain. Their State was bound to outlast the other, so long as it maintained to any extent its old basis of a fecund rural population of free cultivators, supplying a zealous soldiery, headed by a specialised cla.s.s equally dependent on conquest for all advancement. For the trading Carthaginians, war was, beyond a certain point, a mere act of self-defence; they could not have held and administered Italy had they taken it. The supreme general could last only one lifetime; the nation of warriors still yielded a succession of captains, always learning something more of war, and raising the standard of capacity as the progress of machinery widens the scope of all engineers.

The author of a recent and meritorious _History of Rome_, Mr.

Shuckburgh, is satisfied to quote (p. 231) from Polybius, as explaining the fall of Carthage, the generalisation that "Italians as a nation are by nature superior to Phoenicians and Libyans, both in strength of body and courage of soul"; and to add: "That is the root of the matter, from which all else is a natural growth."

This only leaves us asking: "What was the natural root of the alleged physiological superiority?" There must have been reasons.

If they were "racial" or climatic, whence the later implied degeneration of the Romans in body or soul, or both? We are driven to the explanation lying in polity and inst.i.tutions, which it should have been Mr. Shuckburgh's special aim to give, undertaking as he does to deal with "the state of the countries conquered by the Romans." And such explanations are actually offered by Polybius (vi, 53).

-- 6

And yet the deterioration of the Roman State is visibly as sure a sequence as its progress. Nothing that men might then have proposed could save it. In Cicero's day the Senate had become a den of thieves.

The spectacle of the wealth of Lucullus, taken in Napoleonic fas.h.i.+on from the opulent East, set governor after governor elsewhere upon a course of ruthless extortion which depraved Rome as infallibly as it devastated the subject States.

Roman exploitation of conquest began in the relatively moderate fas.h.i.+on of self-supporting victors willing to live and let live. Sicily was at first (210) taxed by Marcellus in a fas.h.i.+on of which Livy makes boast;[80] and after the suppression of the slaves' revolt in 131 B.C., the system was further reformed. Seventeen towns, retaining their lands, paid a fixed tax to the Republic; eight were immune, save for an annual contribution of 800,000 _modius_ of wheat for free doles in Rome; and the rest of the island paid a tenth of all produce, as under Hiero.[81]

Later, the realms of the kings of Macedonia, Pergamos, and Bithynia, and the lands of Cyrene and Cyprus, were made the public patrimony of the conquering State. Sardinia, Spain, North Africa, and Asia were in general taxed a tenth of their produce of all kinds. As the exploitation went on, individual governors added to all this regular taxation a vast irregular plunder on their own account; and nearly every attempt to impeach them was foiled by their accomplices in the Senate.[82] Verres in Sicily, Fonteius in Southern Gaul, Piso in Macedonia, Appius in Cilicia, Flaccus in Asia Minor, wrung infinite gold and loot immeasurable from the victim races by every device of rapacious brigandage, trampling on every semblance of justice, and then devised the ironic infamy of despatching corrupted or terrorised deputations of citizens to Rome to testify to the beneficence of their rule.[83]

It was a riot of robbery in which no public virtue could live. To moralise on the scarcity of Catos is an ill way of spending time if it be not recognised that Catos had latterly become as impossible as eaters of acorns in the upper grades of the ever-plundering State. Cato himself is a product of the last vestiges of the stage before universal conquest; and he begins to show in his own later years all the symptoms of the period of lawless plutocracy. To yearn for a series of such figures is to ask that men shall be capable of holding doggedly by an ethic of honest barbarism while living the lives of pirates and slavers, according no moral sympathy to the larger world of aliens and slaves, yet cheris.h.i.+ng a high public spirit for the small world of the patrician State. The man himself was a mere moral anomaly; and in Cato the Younger, dreaming to the last of a loyal republican life, but always ready at his fellow-citizens' behest to go and beat down the rights or liberties of any other State,[84] we have the paternal bias reproduced in an incurable duality. He sought for honour among thieves, himself being one. Concerning the Catonic att.i.tude towards the "degeneration" of Roman patrician life in the age of conquest, it has been truly said that "the policy of shameless selfishness which was pursued by the Roman Senate during this period, and reached its climax in their abominable conduct towards the unhappy, prostrate city of Carthage--the frivolous wars, tending to nothing but aggrandis.e.m.e.nt and enrichment, waged by Rome continuously after the second Punic War--destroyed the old Roman character[85] far more effectually than Grecian art and philosophy could ever have done. Henceforth there was a fearful increase in internal corruption, immorality, bribery, an insatiable eagerness for riches, disregarding everything else and impudently setting aside laws, orders of the Senate, and legal proceedings, making war unauthorised, celebrating triumphs without permission, plundering the provinces, robbing the allies."[86] And the ideal of conquest inspired it all.

We have only to ask ourselves, What was the administrative cla.s.s to do?

in order to see the fatality of its course. The State must needs go on seeking conquest, by reason alike of the lower-cla.s.s and the upper-cla.s.s problem. The administrators must administer, or rust. The moneyed men must have fresh plunder, fresh sources of profit. The proletaries must be either fed or set fighting, else they would clamour and revolt. And as the frontiers of resistance receded, and new war was more and more a matter of far-reaching campaigns, the large administering cla.s.s at home, men of action devoid of progressive culture, ran to brutal vice and frantic sedition as inevitably as returned sailors to debauch; while the distant leader, pa.s.sing years of camp life at the head of professional troops, became more and more surely a power extraneous to the Republic.

When a State comes to depend for its coherence on a standing army, the head of the army inevitably becomes the head of the State. The Republic pa.s.sed, as a matter of course, into the Empire, with its army of mercenaries, the senatorial cla.s.s having outlived the main conditions of its health and energetic stability; the autocracy at once began to delete the remaining brains by banis.h.i.+ng or slaying all who openly criticised it;[87] and the Empire, even while maintaining its power by the spell of its great traditional organisation, ran through stage after stage of civic degeneration under good and bad emperors alike, simply because it had and could have no intellectual life commensurate with its physical scope. Its function involved moral atrophy. It needs the strenuous empiricism of a Mommsen to find ground for comfort in the apparition of a Caesar in a State that must needs worsen under Caesars even more profoundly than it did before its malady gave Caesar his opportunity.

Not that the Empire could of itself have died as an organism. There are no such deaths in politics; and the frequent use of the phrase testifies to a hallucination that must greatly hamper political science. The ancient generalisation[88] to the youth, maturity, and decrepitude and death of States is true only in respect of their variations of relative military and economic strength, which follow no general rule.

The comparison of the life of political bodies to that of individuals was long ago rightly rejected as vicious by Volney (_Lecons d'Histoire_, 1794, 6ieme Seance), who insisted that political destruction occurred only through vices of polity, inasmuch as all polities have been framed with one of the three intentions of _increasing_, _maintaining_, or _overthrowing_. The explanation is obscure, but the negation of the old formula is just. The issue was taken up and p.r.o.nounced upon to the same effect in the closing chapter of C.A. Walckenaer's _Essai sur l'histoire de l'espece humaine_, 1798. (Professor Flint, in his _History of the Philosophy of History_, cites Walckenaer, but does not mention Volney's _Lecons_.) Le Play, in modern times, has put the truth clearly and strongly: "At no epoch of its history is a people fatally doomed either to progress or decline. It does not necessarily pa.s.s, like an individual, from youth to old age" (cited by H. Higgs in _American Quarterly Journal of Economics_, July, 1890, p. 428). It is to be regretted that Dr. Draper should have adhered to the fallacy of the necessary decay and death of nations in his suggestive work on the _Intellectual Development of Europe_ (ed. 1875, i, 13-20; ii, 393-98). He was doubtless influenced by the American tendency to regard Europe and Asia as groups of "old countries." The word "decay" may of course be used with the implication of mere "sickness," as by Lord Mahon in the opening sentence of his _Life of Belisarius_; but even in that use it gives a lead to fallacy.

Had there been no swarming and aggressive barbarians, standing to later Rome as Rome had done to Carthage--collectively exigent of moral equality as Romans had once been, and therefore conjunctly mighty as against the morally etiolated Italians--the Western Roman Empire would have gone on just as the Eastern[89] so long did, just as China has so long done--would have subsisted with little or no progress, most factors of progress being eliminated from its sphere. It ought now to be unnecessary to point out that Christianity was no such factor, but rather the reverse, as the history of Byzantium so thoroughly proves. No Christian writer of antiquity, save perhaps Augustine[90] in a moment of moral aspiration, shows any perception of the political causation of the decay and fall of the Empire.[91] The forces of intellectual progress that did arise and collapse in the decline and the Dark Ages were extra-Christian heretical forces--Sabellian, Arian, Pelagian, anti-ritualistic, anti-monastic, Iconoclastic. These once deleted, Christianity was no more a progressive force among the new peoples than it was among the old; and the later European progress demonstrably came from wholly different causes--new empire, forcing partial peace; Saracen contact, bringing physics, chemistry, and mathematics; new discovery, making new commerce; recovery of pagan lore, making new speculation; printing, making books abundant; gunpowder, making arms a specialty; and the fresh compet.i.tion and disruption of States, setting up fruitful differences, albeit also preparing new wars. To try to trace these causes in detail would be to attempt a complete sociological sketch of European history, a task far beyond the scope of the present work; though we shall later make certain special surveys that may suffice to ill.u.s.trate the general law. In the meantime, the foregoing and other bird's-eye views of some ancient developments may ill.u.s.trate those of modern times.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 12: Cp. A. Schwegler, _Romische Geschichte_, 1853, i, 610-615; Pelham, _Outlines of Roman History_, 1893, p. 25. When Professor Ferrero (_Greatness and Decline of Rome_, Eng. trans. 1907, i, 5) p.r.o.nounces that "The Romans were a primitive people without the defects peculiar to a primitive people," he sets up a needless mystification. They had the defects of their own culture stage, which was far beyond that of "primitives" in the general sense of the term. They were "semi-civilised barbarians," with a long past of inst.i.tutional life.]

[Footnote 13: It might be an interesting inquiry whether a grouping by threes could have arisen from a primary union of two exogamous clans.]

[Footnote 14: Schwegler, i, 616. The origin of _tribus_ from _three_ is not an accident special to the Romans. Among the Spartans and Dorians likewise there were three stocks (cp. K.O. Muller, _The Dorians_, Eng.

tr. 1830, i, 35-37; Fustel de Coulanges, _La Cite antique_, 8e edit. p.

135, note 2); and the great number of Greek epithets in which "three" or "thrice" enters is a proof of the special importance anciently attached to the number. Cp. K.D. Hullmann, _Ursprung der romischen Verfa.s.sung durch Vergleichungen erlautert_, 1835, p. 24.]

[Footnote 15: Greenidge, _Roman Public Life_, 1901, p. 1.]

[Footnote 16: Pelham, p. 20; Fustel de Coulanges, p. 132, _sq._; Schwegler, i, 610, 615; Ihne, _Early Rome_, 1897, p. 108; Ortolan, _Hist. de la Legislation romaine_, ed. Labbe, 1880, pp. 35, 36.]

[Footnote 17: Schwegler, i, 611, following Dionysius. Cp. Meyer, ii, 514.]

[Footnote 18: Cp. Fustel de Coulanges, pp. 13, 24, 132, 179; Robertson Smith, _Religion of the Semites_, 1889, pp. 245, 247, 251, etc.; Jevons, _Introd. to the History of Religion_, ch. xii.]

[Footnote 19: Cp. Schwegler, i, 628; Ihne, _Early Rome_, p. 107; Dupond, _Magistratures romaines sous la Republique_, 1877, p. 19. The source of the plebs is one of the vexed points of Roman origins; and the view that they were primarily a conquered population is not yet generally accepted. See Shuckburgh, _History of Rome_, 1894, p. 44. The true solution seems to be that the plebs were always being added to in various ways--by aliens, by "broken men," by discarded clients, and by fugitives. Cp. Fustel de Coulanges, p. 279.]

[Footnote 20: Schwegler, i, 621-28, 636-38; Fustel de Coulanges, p. 277.

Note the expression _populo plebique_ in Livy, xxix, 27; Cicero, _Pro Murena_, i; Macrobius, _Saturnalia_, i, 17. Ortolan (endorsed by Labbe) argues (work cited, p. 31) that _populus plebsque_ no more implies separation than _senatus populusque_. But this argument destroys itself.

The Senate as such _was_ distinct from the populus, as having _auctoritas_, while the populus had only _potestas_. The phrase then was not a pleonasm. By this very a.n.a.logy _populus plebsque_ implies a vital legal distinction. Niebuhr, who first made the facts clear (cp. his _Lectures_, Eng. trans. ed. 1870, p. 107), followed Vico, who was led to the true view by knowledge of the separateness of the _popolo_ from the _commune_ in the Italian republics.]

[Footnote 21: Schwegler, i, 619; E.W. Robertson, as cited, p. xxvii. Yet the constant tradition is that not only did the ma.s.s of the people live mainly on farinaceous food and vegetables, but the upper cla.s.ses also in the early period ate meat only on festival days. Cp. Guhl and Koner, _The Life of the Greeks and Romans_, Eng. trans., pp. 501-2; Pliny, _H.N._, xviii, 3, 19; Ramsay, _Roman Antiquities_, 1851, p. 437. The cattle then were presumably sold to the people of the Etruscan and Campanian cities. Professor Ferrero leaves this problem in a state of mystery. The early Romans, he writes, had "few head of cattle" (i, 2); but land capture, he admits, meant increase (p. 5); and at the time of the Roman Protectorate over all Italy (266 B.C.) he recognises "vast wandering herds of oxen and sheep, without stable or pen" (p. 9), conducted by slave shepherds. On such lands there must have been a considerable amount of cattle-breeding at a much earlier period. On the other hand, noting that the Romans early imported terracottas and metals from Etruria, Phoenicia, and Carthage, "besides ivory-work and ornaments, perfumes for funerals, purple for the ceremonial robes of the magistrates, and a few slaves" (p. 3), Professor Ferrero lightly affirms that "it was not difficult to pay for these in exports: timber for s.h.i.+pbuilding, and salt, practically made up the list."]

[Footnote 22: Cp. Schwegler, i, 451, 617-19; ii, 108; E.W. Robertson, _Historical Essays in connection with the Land, the Church, etc._, 1872, pp. xxvi-vii, 244.]

[Footnote 23: E.W. Robertson, as cited, pp. 243-44; Schwegler, i, 617-19.]

[Footnote 24: E.W. Robertson, p. xxv.]