THE SECOND TRIUMVIRATE (44-30 B.C.)
43. The consuls and Cæsar’s nephew, Caius Julius Cæsar Octavianus, sent against Antony by the senate. Battle of Mutina. Antony defeated. Octavian obtains the consulship and the condemnation of the conspirators. Decimus Brutus taken and put to death. The second triumvirate. Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus assume the supreme power. Proscriptions and confiscations. Murder of Cicero. 42. Battle of Philippi. Defeat and death of Brutus and Cassius. Antony meets Cleopatra at Tarsus. 41. War of Perusia between Octavian and the brother and wife of Antony respecting the distribution of lands to the veterans. Octavian makes himself supreme in Italy. 40. The triumvirs divide the empire between them. 39. Treaty of Misenum. The triumvirs grant Sicily, Sardinia, and Peloponnesus to Sextus, the surviving son of Pompey. Antony goes to Egypt. 38. Sicilian War between the triumvirs and Sextus Pompeius. 36. Battle of Naulochus. Defeat and flight of Sextus. Unsuccessful campaign of Antony against the Parthians. 34. Artavasdes, king of Armenia, defeated and captured by Antony. 31. Battle of Actium. Octavian defeats the fleet of Antony and Cleopatra. 30. Suicide of Antony and Cleopatra. Egypt made a Roman province. Octavian sole ruler of the Roman dominions.
CHAPTER I. LAND AND PEOPLE
The fundamental peculiarity of Roman history is the fact that it is the history, not of a country or, in the proper sense, of a nation, but of a city. In Egypt, Thebes was at one time dominant, and Memphis at another; the supreme centre of Mesopotamia shifted between Babylon and Nineveh; whilst in Greece, Athens and Sparta long contested the supremacy. But in all these cases, with the possible exception of the Babylonian, the country as a whole gave its name to the people, and the city was, at best, only the heart of the civilisation; whereas Rome came into power as an isolated community within a little city, the very environs of which were at first hostile territory.
This city chanced to be located in Italy, but for some centuries the names “Roman” and “Italian” were in no sense synonymous. Indeed at an early date the main part of Italy was inhabited by people who were not at all under Roman dominion, and when the legions of Rome issued forth to conquer the territories and the little peninsula, the wars that led to this result had all the significance of foreign conquest. And when these conquests had spread beyond the bounds of Italy proper until, finally, they took in practically all of the civilised world that was worth conquering, except the Parthian kingdom in the far East, it was still the single city on the Tiber which was regarded as constituting the essence of the vast dominion; and the citizen who had come to share in the full rights and privileges of this vast domain needed no other specific designation than the single word “Roman.”
From the point of view of the ethnologist, Greeks and Romans had strong points of difference. The Greeks were dominated by a temperament perhaps more acute and sensitive than that of any other nation of the ancient world. They developed the fine arts in all their main branches—pottery, sculpture, architecture, grammar, and philosophy—to a height which has never been excelled by any subsequent people. But they paid the penalty of their sensibility and their versatility by an instability of purpose, a lack of civic discipline, which speedily worked their downfall.
The Romans developed comparatively little culture. Almost all the lasting monuments of the Romans were partly inspired by intercourse with the Greeks. On the other hand, as might have been expected of a people whose home was within the walls of a city, they were as eminent in the framing of laws, and in the art of government, as the Greeks were in the fine arts. The versatility and levity of the Greek, and his undisciplined life of individual freedom, ruined the nation of the noblest promise in all history. The virile stability of the Roman, and his conception of freedom as subordinate to the duties of patriotism, made him master of the civilised world for many centuries.
To these two nations the world owes, perhaps, an equal debt. The peoples of modern Europe arose from the ruins of the Roman empire, and inherited from it the soundest laws and the best examples of government; which, in some respects, they have been able to improve upon; and, when they had progressed far enough in civilisation, they discovered the culture of the Greeks and developed it, each nation in accordance with its genius and its needs, into the civilisation of the later centuries.
The testimony of language has been accepted as proving that the Romans were Aryans, but that term itself has come to have a somewhat doubtful meaning, as we have already seen. The affinity of their language seems to make it clear that the Romans were more closely allied to the Greeks than to any other of their known contemporaries, and it has been assumed as proven that the ancestors of these two peoples remained in contact with each other long after their separation from the primitive Aryan swarm. But the problem in its entirety deals with many questions that are obscure in the extreme: just when or just how these supposititious Aryans migrated into Italy; what manner of people—what race even—they found there; to what extent they commingled ethnically with the races which they there met and conquered; these are all questions to which authentic history can give but the vaguest answers.a
THE LAND OF ITALY
It is difficult in attempting a geographical sketch for the purpose of elucidating Roman history, to determine where we ought to begin and where to end. For during a long period we are hardly carried out of sight of the Capitol; and at the close of that period we are hurried with startling rapidity into the heart of every country, from the Atlantic to the mountains of Asia Minor, from the ridges of the Alps to the plains that lie beneath Mount Atlas. But since the origin and composition of the people we call Roman depend upon the early state and population of Italy at large, and since in course of time all Italians became Romans, it will be well to follow the usual custom, and begin with a geographical sketch of the Italian peninsula.
This peninsula, the central one of the three which stretch boldly forward from the southern coasts of Europe, lies nearly between the parallels of north latitude 38° and 46°. Its length, therefore, measured along a meridian arc, ought to be about 550 miles. But since, unlike the other two Mediterranean peninsulas, it runs in a direction nearly diagonal to the lines of latitude and longitude, its real length, measured from Mont Blanc to Cape Spartivento, is somewhat more than seven hundred miles.
To estimate the breadth of this long and singularly shaped peninsula, it may conveniently be divided into two parts by a line drawn across from the mouths of the Po to the northern point of Etruria. Below this line the average breadth of the leg of Italy does not much exceed one hundred miles. Above this line both coasts trend rapidly outwards, so that the upper portion forms an irregularly shaped figure, which lies across the top of the leg, being bounded on the north and west by the Alpine range from Illyria to the mouth of the Var, on the south by the imaginary line before drawn, and on the east by the head of the Adriatic Sea. The length of this figure from east to west is not less than 350 miles; while from north to south it measures, on the average, about 120 miles.