Barthold Georg Niebuhr

“ Rome was exhausted; its force was scattered to the winds, its legions powerless; its allies also who could bear arms had most of them shared in the defeat, and they partly expected the dreadful enemy in their own homes. In Rome it was believed that the whole of the army was destroyed: nothing was known of those at Veii. Within its walls were only old men, women and children; defence was not to be thought of. It is not, however, to be supposed that the gates were left open, and that the Gauls, fearing an ambush, had waited several days before the town. ”

“ Among the Romans, the conviction prevailed that Romulus, the founder of Rome, had been born of a maiden ravished by a god; that he had been wonderfully preserved alive, rescued from the floods, and suckled by a she-wolf. The ancient date of this poetry cannot be doubted. But did the legend at all times call Romulus the son of Rea Silvia, or of Ilia? Perizonius has first remarked against Ryckius, that Rea Ilia never occurred in combination; that Rea Silvia was the daughter of Numitor, Ilia of Æneas. He is perfectly right. ”

“ In the same way, the Romans might be considered as the heads of the league; but only so long as Rome was in possession of her power.
There is an old tradition, that in the famine the aged men were killed, to spare them the pain of dying of hunger, and that the little which was left, might be reserved for those who were to propagate the republic. It was almost as sad as at the destruction of Magdeburg, when the number of inhabitants was reduced from 30,000 to 3,000. Rome, even when restored, could for several generations have been only a shadow of what it was before its overthrow. ”

“ The way in which Sicily was wasted under this tyrant, and afterwards, was so frightful, that one cannot understand, how tillage and population could have continued in such a country; and especially how Syracuse could have been one of the greatest cities in the world. His wars, on the whole, were marked by awful calamities; their renown for having been brilliant cannot be gainsayed: the peace which he made at last with the Carthaginians was fair enough. ”

“ If Rome had been overpowered in this struggle, the whole of her army would have been annihilated. The Latins, however, would not have been able to derive the same advantages from it which Rome did; for as Latium itself was wanting in that unity which is based upon a grand central point, the supremacy would have been left in abeyance between it and Samnium. There is every likelihood that Italy would then have fallen under a foreign yoke; it might perhaps have become the hopeless prey of Pyrrhus, or at least of the Carthaginians, and the Gauls would have incessantly wasted it. ”

“ At all events, he ought to be acquainted with the concluding period of the Greek people, and to know how it fared under the rule of the Romans. If we balance the two histories against each other, the Roman one has by far the better claim to the higher rank. A small population enlarges itself, rules at first over thousands, [Pg 79] then over hundreds of thousands, then lords it over the world from the rising to the setting sun; the whole of the west adopts their language and institutions, and their laws are to this day still in force for millions,—such greatness has no parallel in history. ”

“ Nothing is more praiseworthy in Roman history, than that a community, which was far superior to its antagonists in might as well as in numbers, bore with their wiles for a succession of years with the greatest forbearance and self-command, and without committing one illegal action. The aged Camillus, who was past eighty, was now named dictator. In him the old party spirit with all the old feelings, was still alive: called upon by his order, he believed that he could make things possible, which were impossible. To withstand a dictator was more than the plebeians would have dared ”

“ We owe therefore to Fabius an immense debt of gratitude for the most precious and invaluable information. And certainly the careful language used concerning the earlier constitution by Dio Cassius, who consistently calls populus δῆμος, and plebs ὅμιλος or πλῆθος, is derived from Fabius. Thus Fabius not only is the father of Roman history, but in him also is found the highest and most perfect knowledge of the ancient constitution. Censorious people have railed at the idea that we in the nineteenth century should pretend to understand the Roman constitution better than Livy and Dionysius did ”

“ He first conceived the fruitful idea, that the Roman history, like that of the Jewish people, had arisen out of lays: an idea which we cannot sufficiently admire, when we consider the time in which he wrote, and that he was moreover a Dutch philologist; for such national songs are entirely wanting in the Netherlands. A Dane might much more easily have been its author, as Saxo Grammaticus and the songs of the Edda would have led to it. Perizonius had a perfectly unbiassed mind, incredible philological learning, and a real genius for history. ”

“ Well worth our attention is the Etruscan tradition concerning Servius Tullius, and the fragment of Claudius’ speech on the tablets at Lyons, which contains the notices of Cæles Vibenna and Mastarna from Etruscan historians. [81] I never was so much surprised by any literary discovery as by this. Not a soul had taken any heed of it before;—people don’t look at such square letters, especially when they are those of the silly Claudius. I at that time still believed in the Etruscan origin of Rome, and thought that quite a new light would thus be shed upon the whole of the Roman history. ”

“ This one is the very perfection of his manner, and shows how matchless he would have been, had his history been more condensed. Throughout the first decade, a high strain of eloquence prevails. In the third, the monotony of the events constantly checks its display; yet beautifully written are the battles on the Trasimene Lake, and at Cannæ. Here, however, is the turning point. In the fourth, the prolixity gains ground more and more, in which traces of extreme old age are to be recognised. The more freely Livy relates, the more beautiful is his composition. ”

“ If the people were good-natured and conscientious enough to hold out the hand of reconciliation, it would do. But it is not so. If a government wishes to make amends to those whom it has injured, the first step which these take is to revenge themselves. This must excuse the Romans who were in power,—especially if Sp. Cassius fell an innocent victim,—when they were guilty of another arbitrary act, and after his death once more changed the constitution in their own favour. ”

“ This is the folly of all oligarchs, which they continually repeat. The patricians were so infatuated as not to see, that, if they gained over a sufficiently strong party in the Plebes itself against the measure, it would to all intents and purposes be the same as if the resolution had been actually carried, and then rejected; and yet that odium would not be excited. In the end, the patricians never show the courage of letting matters come to a crisis; but they yield with an ill grace, reserving to themselves their old rights, from which they will never abate unless driven to it by sheer force. ”

“ The motives of men are often mean at bottom; yet one ought not to make the rule general, and to bury everything great beneath the littleness of contemptible circumstances. Livy has merely borrowed the tale from others: in him it is the thoughtlessness of haste, and the want of entering into the spirit and relations of the times; he wrote history, not to give an account of facts, but for the sake of the narrative. ”

“ If he had succeeded in comprehending the language of Fabius, all would have been correct; but he understood the Greek language as it was current in his own time, and thence all his mistakes arose. He has lost the clue in the history of the development of the Roman constitution: he is not aware of the difference between δῆμος and ὅμιλος, but he gives all, though it appears to him a riddle, and tries to find a solution. That he is a rhetorician and not a statesman, we indeed see only too clearly. In his criticism he is faulty, but, for all that, not bad: he was a very clear-headed man. ”

“ If the misfortune of an age is once made decisive by extraordinary events, the wisest of rulers cannot ward off a state of pressure and distress. Such a calamity, which befell Rome at that time, was the third Gallic invasion in the year 405, a much more frightful one than the second. The Gauls appeared before the city, the Romans did not venture to give them battle ”

“ THE FIRST WAR WITH THE SAMNITES. PROGRESS OF LEGISLATION.
Majora hinc bella narranda sunt, says Livy. We now arrive at a period in which great masses come into collision; when Rome struggles with a great people, which displayed heroic stedfastness, which possessed great generals and an excellent system of arms (which the Romans even adopted from them) , and which had all the political virtues that give greatness to a nation in the eyes of posterity. ”

“ A crowd of bondmen for debt flocked in to side with them, and now happened that dreadful state of things which had never before been known: the common people marched against Rome, without, however, offering any personal violence to the consul. It was no more the Plebs on the Mons Sacer; but proletarians against the rich, very much like the workmen in manufactories against their masters. But most fortunately for Rome, poor indeed as they had become, they still looked upon themselves as plebeians, and the leading plebeians as their chiefs ”

“ The great event by which Rome emerged from childhood, is the reception of Capua under her protection. It is involved, however, in obscurity, and is falsified besides by the Romans.
When we read in the ancients of a colony which turns in hostility against its mother state, we always think of disloyalty and ingratitude: the ancients themselves, that is to say, our authors, look upon such a defection as a domestic feud of the daughter against the mother. In some detached cases, this may be true; but in most instances, especially in Italian history, the relation is quite a different one. ”

“ But here we have an instance of the innumerable stages by which the Roman constitution developed itself; and it is precisely this gradual development which has given such a long duration to Roman freedom. For the true secret of a great statesman, who is quite as seldom found as any other great genius, is indeed the gradual perfection and reform of the several points of an existing constitution, and not the sudden setting up of a finished work.
Thus therefore the Curies came into the place of the tribes. ”

“ The great body of the people did not as yet form a corporation, though they contained all the elements of one: they increased in the city and the environs at such a rate, especially owing to the union with Latium in the reign of Servius Tullius, that they far outnumbered the old population, and formed the chief strength of Rome, and were employed to a great extent in the wars. And the more they grew, the more did the Tribes, which only intermarried among themselves, die off.
Thus arose the Roman Plebes,—the Greek δῆμος, in German Gemeinde. ”

“ The national migration had stopped; and as they had nowhere been quite a savage people, they had not failed to adopt a certain degree of civilization. They betook themselves to the tilling of land, and became a meek race of peasants; like the Goths under Vitigis, who were likewise a set of unwarlike husbandmen, so that the great Totila had to train them anew into soldiers. The Gauls had two roads to Southern Italy,—the marshes on the Arno; and the Apennine country, which was grown quite wild, being the bulwark of Etruria,—the one down the Tiber, through Umbria, to Latium and Campania ”

“ General opinion is unfavourable to the Tarentines. At the time when they were engaged in war with the Romans, they were indeed a luxurious, unwarlike people; but the blame which is generally heaped upon [Pg 461] them, is in the true spirit of human nature, which when some one, formerly mighty, has fallen, chooses rather to trace to the man himself the causes of his own ruin, than to pity him. I am convinced that in Tarentum, next to Athens, the wisest and most eminently intellectual men have been bred, and that the commonwealth made an excellent use of them. ”

“ France, and Germany, a new era commenced for the civilization of mankind, many began to be startled at the contradictions which some individuals might have remarked before them, but had imposed on themselves silence upon the subject,—as for instance the Roman Valla, the discovery of whose grave is one of the most pleasing remembrances of my life, and Glareanus, who thereby irritated the ingenious Sigonius, a man, however, who had not the least idea of historical criticism. ”

“ If some of the front ranks fell, or were worn out, they took their places; and thus the Roman battle might last a good while. For this, armies must indeed have been trained and practised, as the Romans were. The dust and the shout of battle were not as confusing as the smoke and thunder of artillery. If the hastati had done fighting, they withdrew to the rear of the principes who now commenced; if the troops were overpowered, they fell back on the triarii, who, at that time, formed a reserve which, however, was always obliged to enter into the fight. ”

“ The whole civil and political legislation of Servius Tullius bears the impress of a thoroughly Latin stamp; the relation also to the Latins bespeaks a Latin lawgiver. He may have been a Corniculan, and have ascended the throne in a manner which was contrary to the established custom. He may have sprung from a marriage of disparagement between one of the Luceres with a woman of Corniculum before the connubium was conceded, and this may be at the bottom of the history of his descent; but a foreigner, or a leader of marauders, he certainly was not. ”

“ To us, the spirit is of importance with which the Romans began it; inasmuch as they undertook it amid difficulties, which under the circumstances were not less than those of the first Punic war, for instance, and it was only by long perseverance that they could hope to bring matters to an issue. A city like Veii, which lay so near, and was so strong, could not be taken but by a blockade or a siege: when the Veientines were too weak in the field, they withdrew within their walls, against which the Romans could do nothing. ”

“ The resolution which the latter conceived, shows him to have been a great man: he had lived for his people, so long as they wanted to be great; life had no more value for him when their hearts had failed them, and he made away with it, that his fellow-citizens might be able to say, that the author of the war had atoned for it. This is one of the greatest deeds which were done of old, greater than that of Cato. The Samnites, to their shame, sent his corpse to Rome.—As the Romans had the first time already gone further than in their demands before the war ”

“ Cincinnatus is one of those characters which have a very great name in tradition, but of which the notices in history are scanty, and nearly worthless. He occurs afterwards as a consul, and on that occasion nothing more of any consequence is recorded. Striking facts are told of him only in the Æquian war. There is a prestige of wealth and also of poverty about him: the latter shines forth especially in a rhetorical age, when [Pg 282] no one has a mind to be poor, and it seems so much the more inconceivable if a great man is poor. ”

“ On both sides, it was a struggle for life and death; they aimed at each other’s hearts, like two good swordsmen in a duel: if Hannibal, after the battle of Cannæ, had shown the same determination; if he had not been too cautious, but had pushed his thrusts against the heart of Rome, even as the Samnites did, he would have won. Both parties reckoned much on the discontent of each other’s dependents. The Samnites had their frontier above Sora in the Abruzzi, Casinum being their chief town: from that mountain-range they seem always to have chosen the direction of their operations ”

“ This is the obscurest period of Roman history, as here the eleventh book of Livy is wanting. Certain it is, that Curius had a most fierce quarrel with the senate, no doubt about the division of the public land. Curius insisted upon a larger assignation being made to the people,—for so we must call it, and not commonalty any longer,—and likewise to the libertini, inasmuch as they were in the tribes. The quarrel was now also with the plebeian nobility; and so great was the exasperation, that a band of eight hundred youths united to defend the life of Curius, as the knights did that of Cicero. ”

“ Thus we find in Roman history, as long as there are signs of life in the people, a steady advance of the more recent institutions, as the old ones, upon which they grew, fell into decay. Those who at first were mere allies, are afterwards incorporated, and form plebeian tribes. Thus the whole of the Roman constitution is a sound healthy development, in which nothing stagnates: the Roman people ever revives and springs up anew ”