Theodor Mommsen

“ Whatever may have been the real and the personal motives, we stand here at a turning–point in national destinies. History, too, has its flow and its ebb; here, after the tide of Roman sway over the world has attained its height, the ebb sets in. Northward of Italy the Roman rule had for a few years reached as far as the Elbe; since the battle of Varus its bounds were the Rhine and the Danube. ”

“ Commodus was in every respect the opposite of his father; not a scholar, but a fencing–master; as cowardly and weak in character, as his father was resolute and tenacious of purpose; as indolent and forgetful of duty, as his father was active and conscientious. He not merely gave up the idea of incorporating the territory won, but voluntarily granted even to the Marcomani conditions such as they had not ventured to hope for. The regulation of the frontier–traffic under Roman control, and the obligation not to injure their neighbours friendly to the Romans, were matters of course ”

“ Through the first three centuries of the empire Lyons remained the Roman centre of the Celtic land, and that not merely because it occupied the first place in population and wealth, but because it was, like no other in the Gallic north and but few in the south, a town founded from Italy, and Roman not merely as regards rights, but as regards its origin and its character. ”

“ So far as the knowledge of Latin was a condition for the career of the higher as of the lower magistracies, the Greeks who entered upon this career acquired it; for, though practically it only occurred to the emperor Claudius to withdraw the Roman franchise from the Greeks who did not understand Latin, certainly the real execution of the rights and duties connected with it was possible only for one who was master of the imperial language. But, apart from public life, Latin was never so learned in Greece as Greek in Rome. ”

“ For this epoch was also one productive of great conceptions and far–reaching action. Seldom has the government of the world been conducted for so long a term in an orderly sequence; and the firm rules of administration, which Caesar and Augustus traced out for their successors, maintained their ground, on the whole, with remarkable steadfastness notwithstanding all those changes of dynasties and of dynasts, which assume more than due prominence in a tradition that looks merely to such things, and dwindles erelong into mere biographies of the emperors. ”

“ The Marcomani achieved a victory over the emperor himself; a whole legion was surrounded by the Jazyges and cut down. Shaken by this defeat, Domitian, in spite of the advantages gained by Julianus over the Dacians, hastily concluded with these a peace, which did not indeed prevent him from conferring the crown upon the representative of Decebalus in Rome, Diegis, just as if the latter were a vassal of the Romans, or from marching as victor to the Capitol, but which in reality was equivalent to a capitulation. ”

“ The freedom of the community reaches so far as the rulers allow it, and anything more would doubtless be evil. When Pericles put on the robes of office, he called to himself not to forget that he was ruling over free men and Greeks; to–day the magistrate has to say to himself that he rules under a ruler, over a town subject to proconsuls and imperial procurators, that he can and may be nothing but the organ of the government, that a stroke of the governor’s pen suffices to annul any one of his decrees. ”

“ As when a great and noble family is reduced to a single survivor, and the sin which this last of the house commits brings all his ancestors into dishonour, so you stand in Hellas. Believe not that you are the first of the Greeks; you are the only ones. If we look at those pitiful scoundrels, the great destinies of the past become themselves inconceivable; the stones and ruins of cities show more clearly the pride and the greatness of Hellas than these descendants not even worthy of Mysian ancestors ”

“ In Roman military history Cannae and Carrhae and the Teutoburg Forest are glorious pages compared with the double disgrace of Novaesium; only a few individual men, not a single troop, preserved a pure escutcheon amidst the general dishonour. The frightful disorganisation of the political and, above all, of the military system, which meets us on the fall of the Julio–Claudian dynasty,143 appears—more clearly even than in the leaderless battle of Betriacum—in those events on the Rhine, to which the history of Rome never before and never after exhibits a parallel. ”

“ The retreat of the four legions of Caecina from the Ems to the Rhine resembled exactly that of Varus; indeed, the difficult, marshy country offered perhaps still greater difficulties than the defiles of the wooded hills. The whole mass of natives, with the two princes of the Cherusci, Arminius and his highly esteemed uncle Inguiomerus, at their head, threw themselves on the retreating troops in the sure hope of preparing for them the same fate, and filled the morasses and woods all around. ”

“ In the remote age, when the coasts of the Mediterranean were first navigated and settled, and the world began to be apportioned among the progressive nations at the expense of those left behind, the flood of Hellenic emigration had poured no doubt over all the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, but yet nowhere—not even towards Italy and Sicily,—in so broad a stream as over the Aegean Sea rich in islands, and the adjacent charming coast of anterior Asia rich in harbours. ”

“ The fact that the Saxons sent from the battle–field the head of Varus to the king of the Suebians, can be nothing but the savage expression of the thought that the hour had come for all Germans to throw themselves in joint onset upon the Roman empire, and thus to secure the frontier and the freedom of their land, as they could alone be secured, by striking down the hereditary foe in his own home. But the cultured man and the politic king accepted the gift of the insurgents only in order to forward the head to the emperor Augustus for burial ”

“ Here was their home on the Alpheus; here the seat of the oldest imitations, of the Pythia, Isthmia, and Nemea, still belonging to the great times of the Hellenic name and glorified by its classic poets, and no less of a number of more recent but richly equipped similar festivals, the Euryclea, which the just–mentioned lord of Sparta had founded under Augustus, the Athenian Panathenaea, the Panhellenia, endowed by Hadrian with imperial munificence and likewise celebrated at Athens. ”

“ Neither the Macedonians nor the Romans were Hellenes in the full sense of the word; it is indeed the sad feature of Greek development that the Attic naval empire was more a hope than a reality, and the work of union could not emanate from the bosom of the nation itself. While in a national respect the Macedonians stood nearer to the Greeks than the Romans did, the commonwealth of Rome had politically far more of elective affinity to the Hellenic than the Macedonian hereditary kingdom. ”

“ The grasping at the frontier of the Elbe was a mighty, perhaps a too bold stroke, undertaken possibly by Augustus—who did not generally soar so high—only after years of hesitation, and doubtless not without the determining influence of the younger stepson who was in closest intercourse with him. But to retrace too bold a step is, as a rule, not a mending of the mistake, but a second mistake. The monarchy had need of warlike honour unstained and of unconditional warlike success, in quite another way than the former burgomaster–government ”

“ Misgovernment of the provincial administration.The self–mastery of Hellenism cannot manifest itself in the field of public life with the purity and beauty which it presents in the quiet homestead, after which history happily does not inquire any more than it inquires after history. When we turn to public affairs, there is more to be told of misrule than of rule, both as regards the Roman government and the Greek autonomy. ”

“ At this epoch of complete world–peace, when there was neither a Greek nor a barbarian war anywhere, when civic commands, civic treaties of peace and alliances belonged solely to history, the advice was very reasonable to leave Marathon and Plataeae to the schoolmasters, and not to heat the heads of the Ecclesia by such grand words, but rather to content themselves with the narrow circle of the free movement still allowed to them. The world, however, belongs not to reason but to passion. The Hellenic burgess could still even now do his duty towards his fatherland ”

“ Communities with wide bounds, firmly knit in this way by inward ties, were a power. Such as Caesar found the Gallic communities, with the mass of the people held in entire political as well as economic dependence, and an overpowerful nobility, they substantially remained under Roman rule; exactly as in pre–Roman times the great nobles, with their train of dependents and bondsmen to be counted by thousands, played the part of masters each in his own home, so Tacitus describes the state of things in Tiberius’s time among the Treveri. ”

“ Subsequent occurrences here were crises within the Roman world. When that world threatened to fall asunder, the West as well as the East separated itself for some time from the centre of the empire; but the separate state of Postumus was the work of necessity, not of choice, and the separation was merely de facto; the emperors who bore sway over Gaul, Britain, and Spain, laid claim to the dominion of the whole empire quite as much as their Italian rival emperors. Certainly traces enough remained of the old Celtic habits and also of the old Celtic unruliness. ”

“ Once upon a time the honour of Hellas rested on many, and many increased its renown—you, the Athenians, the Lacedaemonians, Thebes, Corinth for a time, at a remote period Argos. But now the others are as nothing; for some are totally decayed and destroyed, others conduct themselves271 as you know, and are dishonoured and destroyers of their old renown. You are surviving; you alone are still somewhat and are not utterly despised; for, after the way in which those go to work, all Hellenes would long ago have sunken more deeply than the Phrygians and the Thracians. ”

“ It was only in the time of the empire that the care of art, and above all of literature, revived at least outwardly with the prosperity of Asia Minor. To a primacy proper, such as was possessed by Athens as a university–town, by Alexandria in the sphere of scientific research, and by the frivolous capital of Syria for the drama and the ballet, none of the numerous cities of Asia Minor could lay claim in any direction whatever; but general culture was probably nowhere more widely diffused and more influential. ”

“ The barbarians did not yet venture to face a strong and well–led Roman army; they retreated to their forests and morasses, and the brave emperor, following them even thither, fought in front of all hand to hand. From these conflicts, which were doubtless directed from Mentz primarily against the Alamanni, he could with right call himself Germanicus; and even for the future the expedition of the year 236, for long the last great victory which the Romans gained on the Rhine, bore some fruit. ”

“ At first, doubtless, on the Rhine the imperialists, in concert with the insurgent Germans, had full freedom. The remnants of the two legions that had capitulated in Vetera were put to death, contrary to the terms of surrender and to the will of Civilis; the two from Novaesium and Bonna were sent to Treves; all the Roman camps on the Rhine, large and small, with the exception of Mogontiacum, were burnt. The Agrippinenses found themselves in the worst plight. The imperialists had certainly confined themselves to requiring from them the oath of allegiance ”

“ The world doubtless had peace, but not the streets and squares of Athens. Even under Augustus an insurrection in Athens assumed such proportions that the Roman government had to take steps against the free city;177 and though this event stands isolated, riots on the street on account of the price of bread and on other trifling occasions belonged in Athens to the order of the day. The prospect must not have been much better in numerous other free towns, of which there is less mention. To give criminal justice absolutely into the hands of such a burgess–body could hardly be justified ”

“ Camalodunum itself was taken. His brother Caratacus, it is true, obstinately continued the resistance, and gained for himself, in victory or defeat, a proud name with friend and foe; nevertheless, the progress of the Romans was not to be checked. One prince after another was beaten and deposed—the triumphal arch of Claudius names eleven British kings as conquered by him; and what did not succumb to the Roman arms yielded to the Roman largesses. Numerous men of rank accepted the possessions which the emperor conferred on them at the expense of their countrymen ”

“ Outrages of this nature brought the provincials to extremities; even before Vitellius left Gaul, a certain Mariccus, from the canton of the Boii, dependent on the Haedui, came forward a god on earth, as he said, and destined to restore the freedom of the Celts; and people flocked in troops to his banner. But the exasperation in the Celtic country was not of so very great moment. The very rising of Vindex had most clearly shown how utterly incapable the Gauls were of releasing themselves from the Roman embrace. ”

“ The Roman senate and the Roman rulers soon came to be drawn from any other region of the empire just as much as from Italy; the Quirites of this epoch, who have become the nominal heirs of the world–subduing legionaries, have nearly the same relation to the memories of the olden time as our Knights of St. John have to Rhodes and Malta; and they look upon their heritage as a right capable of being turned to profitable account—as an endowment provided for the benefit of the poor that shrink from work. ”

“ The boundary between Dalmatia and Macedonia was at the same time the political and linguistic demarcation of the West and East. As the spheres of rule of Caesar and Marcus Antonius came into contact at Scodra, so did those of Rome and Byzantium after the partition of the empire in the fourth century. Here the Latin province of Dalmatia bordered with the Greek province of Macedonia; and the younger sister stands here alongside of the elder, vigorous in aspiration and excelling in energy of effort. ”