A. H. J. Greenidge

“ A skill in horsemanship that was the wonder of the world, the eye for a country hastily traversed, the memory for the spot once seen, the power of rapid mobilisation and of equally rapid disappearance, the gift of being a knight one day, a shepherd or a peasant the next—these were the attributes that made a Roman conquest of Numidia so long impossible and rendered diplomacy imperative as a supplement to war. ”

“ And those who were about Gracchus must soon have seen that the traces of youth were to be found only in his passion, his frankness, his impetuous vigour; no discerning eye could fail to be aware of the cool, calculating, intellect which unconsciously used emotion as its mask, of a mind that could map and plan a political campaign in perfect self-confident security, view the country as a whole and yet master every detail, and then leave the issue of the fight to burning words and passionate appeals. ”

“ Young men were seen in the Forum in robes of a material as soft as that worn by women and almost transparent in its thinness. Since all these instruments of pleasure, and the luxury that appealed to ambition even more keenly than to taste, were pursued with a ruinous competition, prices were forced up to an incredible degree. An amphora of Falernian wine cost one hundred denarii, a jar of Pontic salt-fish four hundred; a young Roman would often give a talent for a favourite, and boys who ranked in the highest class for beauty of face and elegance of form fetched even a higher price than this. ”

“ The tyranny of a single man was alone sufficient to bring to an end a government which had its roots in the most distant past, which had presided over the very birth of the city. And, if sanctity alone is to be the ground of immunity, what are we to think of the punishment of a vestal virgin? Is there anything in Rome more holy and awe-inspiring than the maidens who tend and guard the eternal flame? ”

“ The Italian peasant had ever had a hard fight with the insalubrity of his soil. Fever has always been the dreaded goddess of the environs of Rome. But constant labour and effective drainage had kept the scourge at bay, until the evil moment came when the time of the peasant was absorbed, and his energy spent, in the toils of constant war, when his land was swallowed up in the vast estates that had rapid profits as their end and careless slaves as their cultivators. ”

“ For the present the reign of the capitalist was supreme, and the plantation system was dominant throughout the greater part of Italy. The most essential ingredient in this system was the slave,—an alien and a chattel, individually a thing of little account, but reckoned in his myriads the most powerful factor in the economic, and therefore in the political, life of the times, the gravest of the problems that startled the reformer. The soil of Italy was now peopled with widely varied types, and echoes of strange tongues from West and East could be heard on every hand. ”

“ The fiery orator was less to be dreaded than the unwearied man of action, whose restless energy was controlled by a clearness of judgment and concentration of purpose, which could distinguish every item of his vast sphere of administration and treat the task of the moment as though it were the one nearest to his heart. Even those who hated and feared Gracchus were struck with amazement at the practical genius which he revealed; while the sight of the leader in the midst of his countless tasks, surrounded by the motley retinue which they involved, roused the wondering admiration of the masses. ”

“ Masses of men, like individuals, love a protégé more than a benefactor. They have a pride in looking at the colossal figure which they have helped to create. And had not they in a sense made Scipio? Their love had been quickened by the sense of danger; they had braved the anger of the nobles to put power into his hands; they had twice raised him to the consulship in violation of the constitution. And now what was their reward? He had deliberately chosen to espouse the cause of the allies and oppose the interests of the Roman electorate. Scipio's enemies had good material to work upon. ”

“ To raise a cry for the restoration of free labour on this exiguous scale might have exposed a legislator to the disappointment, if not derision, of his friends and invited the criticism, effective because popular, of all his secret foes. The masters of the world were not likely to give enthusiastic support to a leader who exhibited as their goal the lonely, barren and often dangerous life of sheep-driver to some greedy capitalist, and who offered them the companionship, and not the service, of the slaves that their victorious arms had won. ”

“ As the magistracy had become the monopoly of a class, the prejudice might have been little more than one of the working principles of an aristocratic government, had not the arts which supplied the amenities of life actually tended to drift into the hands of the non-citizen or the man of defective citizenship. The most abject Roman could in his misery console himself with the thought that the hands, which should only touch the plough and the sword, had never been stained by trade. His ideal was that of the nobleman in his palace. ”

“ Sulla was not one of the clumsy intriguers who laboriously lay up a store of favour and are easily detected in the attempt. He was a terrible man because his insight and his charm were a part of his very nature, as were also the dark current of ambition, scarcely acknowledged even by its possessor, and the surging tides of passion, carefully dammed by an exquisitely balanced intellect into a level stream, on which crowds might float and believe themselves to be victims or agents of an overmastering principle, not of a single man's caprice. ”

“ The beasts that prowl about Italy have holes and lurking-places where they may make their beds. You who fight and die for Italy enjoy but the blessings of air and light. These alone are your heritage. Homeless, unsettled, you wander to and fro with your wives and children. Our generals are in the habit of inspiring their soldiers to the combat by exhorting them to repel the enemy in defence of their tombs and ancestral shrines. The appeal is idle and false. You cannot point to a paternal altar, you have no ancestral tomb. No! you fight and die to give wealth and luxury to others. ”

“ A climax of the type of the servile war in Sicily was perhaps needed to bring the social problem home to thinking men in Rome. Not that it by any means sufficed for all who pondered on the public welfare or laboured at the business of the State. The men who measured happiness by wealth and empire might still have retained their unshaken confidence in the Fortune of Rome. Had a Capys of this class arisen, he might have given a thrilling picture of the immediate future of his city, dark but grimly national in its emergence from trial to triumph. ”

“ If one ignored his outrages on his own race, had he not massacred Roman merchants, prompted the treacherous slaughter of a Roman garrison, and devised the murder of a client of the Roman people in the very streets of Rome? In truth, a formidable indictment might be brought against Jugurtha, nor was it the care of any one to discriminate which of the counts referred to acts of war, and which must be classed in the category of merely private crimes. ”

“ His auditors learnt the details of a commander's environment—the elaborate cooking apparatus, the throng of handsome favourites, the jars of wine which, when emptied, returned to Rome as receptacles of gold and silver mysteriously acquired. Gracchus must have delighted his audience with a subject on which the masses love to dwell, the vices of their superiors. The luridness of the picture must have given it a false appearance of universal truth. ”

“ The most respected man in Rome was using the vulgar abuse of the streets to the sovereign people; and the man who used this language was so blinded by prejudice as not to see that the blood which he reviled gave the promise of a new race, that the mob which faced him was not a crowd of Italian peasants, willing victims of the martinet, that the Asiatic and the Greek, with their sordid clothes and doubtful occupations, possessed more intelligence than the Roman members of the Scipionic circle and might one day be the rulers of Rome. The new race was one of infinite possibilities. ”

“ Their earlier victims had been the allies and dependants of Rome; they had drawn revenues from kings and free peoples, they had pillaged the public treasury. But they had not yet begun to put up for sale the security of the empire and of Rome itself. Now this last and monstrous stage had been reached. The authority of the senate, the power which the people had delegated to its magistrate, had been betrayed to the most dangerous of foes; not satisfied with treating the allies of Rome as her enemies, the nobility were now treating her enemies as allies. ”

“ It was no difficult task to find the man, for there was one who was marked out by birth, traditions, temperament and genius as the fittest exponent of a cause which, in spite of its intricate complications that baffled the analysis of the ordinary mind, could still in its essential features be described as the cause of the people. It is indeed singular that, in a political civilisation so unkind as the Roman to the merits of youth, hopes should be roused and fear inspired by a man so young and inexperienced as Caius Gracchus. ”

“ The agrarian legislation had indeed run a successful course; yet the very hindrance to its operation at a critical moment had, in the eyes of the discontented, turned success into failure and left behind a bitter feeling of resentment at the treacherous dexterity of the government. The men, in whose imagined interests the people had been defrauded of their coveted land, had by a singular irony of fortune been driven ignominiously from Rome and were now the victims of graver suspicions on the part of the government than on that of the Roman mob. ”

“ The Roman in pursuit of gain was a restless spirit, who would voyage to any land that was, or was likely to be, under imperial control, establish his banking house and villa under any clime, and be content to spend the most active years of his life in the exploitation of the alien; but to him it was a living truth that all roads led to Rome. The city was the nucleus of enterprise, the heart of commerce; and such sentiment as the trader possessed was centred on the commercial life of the Forum and the political devices on which it fed. ”

“ The burden of military service, the curse of debt, the poverty of an agrarian proletariate, the hunger for land, the striving of the artisan and the merchant after better conditions of labour and of trade—the separate cries of discontent that find their unison in a protest against the monopoly of office and the narrow or selfish rule of a dominant class, and thus gain a significance as much political as social—all these plaints had filled the air at the time when Caius Licinius near the middle of the fourth century, and Appius Claudius at its close, evolved their projects of reform. ”

“ The frequency of the gift of liberty to slaves is one of the brightest aspects of the system of servitude as practised by the Romans; but its very beneficence is an illustration of the aristocrat's contempt for the proletariate; for, where the ideal of citizenship is high, manumission—at least of such a kind as shall give political rights, or any trading privileges, equivalent to those of the free citizen—is infrequent. In the Rome of this period, however, the liberation of a slave showed something more than a mere negative neglect of the interests of the citizen. ”

“ The demand for atonement was the voice of the conserver of Rome's moral life, of the patriotic devotee who was striving earnestly to reclaim the waning favour of her tutelary gods. If it was further believed that the seat of the corruption was to be found amidst the families of the nobility itself, the last barrier to resistance had been broken down, for even to seem to shield the unholy thing was to make its lurking place an object of horror and execration. ”

“ As a man of insight he soon learnt Scipio by heart, as a born strategist and trained hunter he soon saw through the tricks of the enemy, as a man devoid of the physical sense of fear he was foremost in every action. He had grasped at once the secret of Roman discipline, and his habit of implicit obedience to the word of command was as remarkable as his readiness in offering the right suggestion, when his opinion was asked. Intelligence was not a striking feature in the mental equipment of the staff which surrounded Scipio ”