Part 7 (2/2)

It is probable that without the support of the equestrian order the project for the foundation of Narbo Martius might have fallen through.

The man of popular sympathies whose measures attracted their support was tolerably certain of success, and the man who posed as the champion of the order was still more firmly placed. The latter position was occupied for a considerable time by Caius Servilius Glaucia, whose tribunate probably belongs to the close of the period which we are describing.[823] Glaucia himself, probably one of those scions of the n.o.bility whom an original bent of mind had alienated from the narrow interests of his order, was a man who, lacking in the gift of pa.s.sionate but steadfast seriousness which makes the great reformer, possessed powers admirably adapted for holding the popular ear and inspiring his auditors with a kind of robust confidence in himself. Ready, acute and witty,[824] he possessed the happy faculty of taking the Comitia, under the guise of the plain and honest man, into his confidence. The very ignorance of his auditors became a respectable attribute, when it was figured as ingenuous simplicity which needed protection against the tortuous wiles of the legislator and the official draughtsman. On one occasion he told his audience that the essence of a law was its preamble. If, when read to them, it was found to contain the words ”dictator, consul, praetor or magister equitum,” the bill was no concern of theirs. But, if they caught the utterance ”and whosoever after this enactment,” then they must wake up, for some new fetter of law was being forged to bind their limbs.[825] A man of this unconventional type was not likely to be popular in the senate, and the opprobrious name, which he subsequently bore in the Curia,[826] is a proof of the liveliness which he imparted to debate.

At the time of Glaucia's tribunate some subtle movement seems to have been on foot for undoing the judiciary law of Caius Gracchus and ousting the knights from their possession of the court before which senators most frequently appeared. The law which dealt with the crime of extortion by Roman officials had been frequently renewed, and, whenever a proposal was made for recasting the enactment with a view to effecting improvements in procedure, the equestrian tenure of the court was threatened; for a new law might state qualifications for the jurors differing from those which had given this department of jurisdiction to the knights. The relief of the order was therefore great when the necessary work of revision was undertaken by one who showed himself an ardent champion of equestrian claims.[827] Glaucia's alteration in procedure was thorough and permanent. He introduced the system of the ”second hearing ”--an obligatory renewal of the trial, which rendered it possible for counsel to discuss evidence which had been already given, and for jurors to get a grasp of the ma.s.s of scattered data which had been presented to their notice--[828] and he also made it possible to recover damages, not only from the chief malefactor, but from all who had dishonestly shared his spoils.[829] These principles continued to be observed in trials for extortion to the close of the Republic, and may have been the only permanent relic of Glaucia's feverish political career. But for the moment the clauses of his law which dealt with the qualifications of the jurors, were those most anxiously awaited and most heartily acclaimed. He had stemmed a reaction and consolidated, beyond hope of alteration for a long term of years, the system of dual control established by Caius Gracchus.

The careers and successes of Marius, Cra.s.sus and Glaucia exhibit the spirit of unrest which broke at intervals through the apathetic tolerance displayed by the people towards the rule of the n.o.bility.

These alternations of confidence and distrust find their counterpart in the religious history of the times; but a panic springing from a belief in the anger of the G.o.ds was even more difficult to control than the alarm excited by the att.i.tude of the government. Such a panic knew no distinctions of station, s.e.x or age; it seized on citizens who cared nothing for the problems of administration, it was strong in proportion to the weakness of its victims, and gathered from the dark thoughts and wild words of the imbecile the poison which infected the sober mind and a.s.sumed, from the very universality of the sickness, the guise of a healthy effort at rooting out some deep-seated pollution from the State.

The gloomy record of the religious persecutions of the past made it still more difficult for a government, which prided itself on the retention of the ancient control of morals, which gloried in its monopoly of an historic priesthood that had often set its hand to the work of extirpation, to stifle such a cry. 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 G.o.ds. If it was further believed that the seat of the corruption was to be found amidst the families of the n.o.bility itself, the last barrier to resistance had been broken down, for even to seem to s.h.i.+eld the unholy thing was to make its lurking place an object of horror and execration.

The nerves of the people were first excited by various prodigies that had appeared; a confirmation of their fears might have been found in the utter destruction of the army of Porcius Cato in Thrace;[830] and a strange calamity soon gave an index to the nature of the offence which excited the anger of the G.o.ds. When Helvius, a Roman knight, was journeying with his wife and daughter from Rome to Apulia, they were enveloped in a sudden storm. The alarm of the girl urged the father to seek shelter with all speed. The horses were loosed from the vehicle, the maiden was placed on one, and the party was hastening along the road, when suddenly there was a blinding flash and, when it had pa.s.sed, the young Helvia and her horse were seen p.r.o.ne upon the ground. The force of the lightning had stripped every garment and ornament from her body, and the dead steed lay a few paces off with its trappings riven and scattered around it.[831] Death by a thunderbolt had always a meaning, which was sometimes hard to find; but here the G.o.ds had not left the inquiring votary utterly in doubt. The nakedness of the stricken maiden was a riddle that the priests could read. It was a manifest sign that a virginal vow had been broken, and that some of the keepers of the eternal fire were tainted with the sin of unchast.i.ty. The destruction of the horse seemed to portend that a knight would be found to be a partner in the crime.[832] Evidence was invited and was soon forthcoming. The slave of a certain Barrus came forward and deposed to the corruption of three of the vestal virgins, Aemilia, Licinia and Marcia.[833] He pretended that the incestuous intercourse had been of long standing, and he named his own master amongst many other men whom he declared to be the authors of the sacrilege. The maidens were believed to have added to their lovers to screen their first offence; the sacrifice of their honour became the price of silence; and their first corrupters were forced to be dumb when jealousy was mastered by fear. The knowledge of the crime is believed to have been widely spread amongst the circles of the better cla.s.s, until the conspiracy of silence was broken down by the action of a slave,[834] and all who would not be deemed accomplices were forced to add their share to the weight of the accusing testimony.

A scandal of this magnitude called for a formal trial by the supreme religious tribunal, and towards the close of the year[835] Lucius Metellus, the chief pontiff, summoned the incriminated vestals before the college. Aemilia was condemned, but Licinia and Marcia were acquitted. There was an immediate outcry; the pontiff's leniency was severely censured; and the anger and fear of the people emboldened a tribune, s.e.xtus Peducaeus, to propose for the first time that the secular arm should wrest from the pontifical college the spiritual jurisdiction that it had abused. He carried a resolution that a special commission should be established by the people to continue the investigation.[836] The judges were probably Roman knights after the model of the Gracchan jurors; the president was the terrible Lucius Ca.s.sius Longinus, already known for his severity as a censor and famed for his penetration as a criminal judge. This fatal penetration, which had endowed his tribunal with the nickname ”the reef of the accused,” [837] was now welcomed as a surety that the inquiry would be searching, and that the innocence which survived it would be so well established that all doubt and fear would be dissolved. This commission condemned, not only the two vestals whom the pontiffs had acquitted, but many of their female intermediaries as well.[838] Some of their supposed paramours must also have been convicted; amongst the accused was Marcus Antonius, who was in future days to share the realm of oratory with Lucius Cra.s.sus. He was on the eve of his departure to Asia, where he was to exercise the duties of a quaestor, when he was summoned to appear before the court over which Ca.s.sius presided. He might have pleaded the benefit of his obligation to continue his official duties;[839] but he preferred to waive his claim and face his judges. His escape was believed to have been mainly due to the heroic conduct of a young slave, who, presented of his own free will to the torture, bore the anguish of the rack, the scourge and the fire without uttering a word that might incriminate his master.[840] The free employment of such methods in trials for incest throws a grave doubt on the value of the judgment which they elicited; and, when a court is established for the purpose of appeasing the popular conscience, a part at least of its conduct may be easily suspected of being preordained. Ca.s.sius's rigour in this matter was thought excessive;[841] but, even had he and the jurors meted out nothing but the strictest justice, the memory of their sentence would long have rankled in the minds of the influential families whose members they had condemned, and thus perpetuated the tradition of their unnecessary severity. It may be doubted, however, whether a secular court was competent to inflict the horrible penalties of pontifical jurisdiction, to condemn the vestal to a living grave and her paramour to death by the scourge;[842] interdiction, and perhaps in the more serious cases the death by strangling usually reserved for traitors, may have been meted out to the men, while the women may have been handed over to their relatives for execution. But even this exemplary visitation of the vices which lurked in the heart of the State was not deemed sufficient to appease the G.o.ds or to quiet the popular conscience. To punish the guilty was to offer the barest satisfaction to heaven and to conscience; a fuller atonement was demanded, and the Sibylline oracles, when consulted on the point, were understood to ordain the cultivation of certain strange divinities by the living sacrifice of four strangers, two of h.e.l.lenic and two of Gallic race.[843] The accomplishment of this act must have been a severe strain on the reason and conscience of a government which sixteen years later absolutely prohibited the performance of human sacrifice[844] and soon made efforts to stamp out the barbarous ritual even in its foreign dependencies.[845] Even this concession to the panic of the times could not be regarded as fraught with much worldly success. The G.o.ds seemed still to retain an unkind feeling both to the city and the government.

Two years later there was a return of dreadful prodigies, and a great part of Rome was laid waste by a terrible fire. A few months more and news was brought from Africa which shook to its very foundations the fabric of senatorial rule.[846]

CHAPTER VI

The land, on which the eyes of the world were soon to be fastened, was the neglected protectorate which had been built up to secure the temporary purpose of the overthrow of Carthage, and had since remained in the undisturbed possession of the peaceful descendants of Masinissa.

The fortunes of the kingdom of Numidia, so far as they affected that kingdom itself, deserved to be neglected by its suzerain; for the power which Masinissa had won by arms and diplomacy was more than sufficient to protect its own interests. The Numidia of the day formed in territorial extent one of the mightiest kingdoms of the world, and ranked only second to Egypt amongst the client powers of Rome.[847] It extended from Mauretania to Cyrenaica,[848] from the river Muluccha to the greater Syrtis, thus touching on the west the Empire of the Moors, at that time confined to Tingitana, on the east almost penetrating to Egypt, and enjoying the best part of the fertile region which borders the coast of the Mediterranean.[849] For the Moroccan boundary of the kingdom--the river Muluccha or Molocath--see Gobel _Die Westkuste Afrikas im Altertum_ pp. 79,80. From this vast tract of country Rome had cut out for herself a small section on the north-east. In the creation of the province of Africa her moderation and forbearance must have astonished her Numidian client; and, if Masinissa showed signs of hesitancy in rousing himself for the destruction of Carthage, the fears of his sons must have been immediately dispelled when they saw the slender profits which Rome meant to reap from the suppression of their joint rival. The Numidian kings were even allowed to keep the territory which had been wrested from Carthage between the Second and Third Punic Wars. This comprised the region about the Tusca, which boasted not less than fifty towns, the district known as the Great Plains,[850] which has been identified with the great basin of the Dakhla of the Oulad-bon-Salem, and probably the plateau of Vaga (Bedja) which dominates this basin.[851] The Roman lines merely extended from the Tusca (the Wad El-Kebir) in the North, where that river flows into the Mediterranean opposite the island of Thabraca (Tabarka) to Thenae (Henschir Tina) on the south-east.[852] But even the upper waters of the Tusca belonged to Numidia, as did the towns of Vaga, Sicca Veneria and Zama Regia. Consequently the Roman frontier must have curved eastward until it reached the point where a rocky region separates the basin of the Bagradas (Medjerda) from the plains of the Sahel; thence it ran to the neighbourhood of Aquae Regiae and thence, probably following the line of a ditch drawn between the two great depressions of Kairouan and El-Gharra, to its ultimate bourne at Thenae.[853] It is clear that the Romans did not look on their province as an end desirable in itself.

They had left in the hands of their Numidian friends some of the most fertile lands, some of the richest commercial towns, situated in a district which they might easily have claimed. Against such annexation Masinissa could have uttered no word of legitimate protest. His kingdom had already been almost doubled by the acquisition of the lands of his rival Syphax, and his sons saw themselves through the aid of Rome in possession of an artificially created kingdom, which was so entirely out of harmony with the traditions of Numidian life that it could scarcely have entered into the dreams of any prince of that race. But the conquering city reposed some faith in grat.i.tude, and reposed still more in its habitual policy of caution. The province which it created was simply a political and strategic necessity. It was intended to secure the negative object of preventing the reconst.i.tution of the great political and commercial centre which had fallen.[854] If Carthage was never to rise again, a fragment of the coast-line must be kept in the hands of the possessors of its devastated site. It might have been better for the peace of Africa had the Romans been a little more grasping and had the Roman position been stronger than it was. The Phoenicians scattered along the coast had become familiar objects to the Berber inhabitants and their kings; to the enlightened monarch they were a valuable addition to the population of any of his cities--all the more valuable now that they were politically powerless. But with the Roman official and the Roman trader it was different. Here was an alien and (in spite of the restraint of the government) an encroaching civilisation, utterly unfamiliar to the eyes of the natives, but known to justify its lordly security by that dim background of power which clung to the name of the paramount city of the West. The Roman possessions were an ugly eyesore to a man who held that Africa should be for the Africans. The wise Masinissa might tolerate the spectacle, content (as, indeed, he should have been) with the power and security which Rome's friends.h.i.+p had brought to her ally. But it remained to be seen whether his views would always be held by his own subjects or by some less cautious or less happily placed successor of his own line.

It was indeed possible that a hostile feeling of nationality might be awakened beyond the limits even of the great kingdom of Numidia. The designations which the Romans employ for the natives of North Africa obscure the fact, which was recognised in later times by the Arab conquerors, of the unity of the great Berber folk.[855] Roman historians and geographers speak of the Numidians and Mauretanians as though they were distinct peoples; but there can be little doubt that, then as to-day, they were but two fractions of the same great race, and that even the wild Gaetulians of the South are but representatives of the parent stock of this indigenous people. As in the case of nearly all races which in default of historical data we are forced to call indigenous, two separate elements may be distinguished in this stock, an earlier and a later, and survivals of the original distinctions between these elements were clearly discernible in many parts of Northern Africa; but, as the fusion between these stocks had been effected in prehistoric times, a common Berber nationality may be held to have extended from the Atlantic almost to Egypt, at the time when the Romans were added to the immigrant Semites and Greeks who had already sought to dwell amidst its borders. The basis of this nationality is thought to be found in the aborigines of the Sahara who had gradually moved up from the desert to the present littoral. There they were joined by a race of another type who were wending their way from what is now the continent of Europe. The Saharic man was of a dark-brown colour but with no traces of the negroid type. His European comrade was a man of fair complexion and light hair; and these curiously blended races continued to live side by side and to form a single nation, preserving perhaps each some of its own psychical characteristics, but speaking in common the language of the older Saharic stock.[856] But the two races were not uniformly distributed over the various territories of Northern Africa. The white race was perhaps more in evidence in Mauretania, as it is in the Morocco of to-day;[857] the dark race was probably most strongly represented amongst the Gaetulians of the South. There were, in short, in Northern Africa two zones, marked by differences of civilisation as well as of ethnic descent, which were clearly distinguished in antiquity. The first is represented by the Afri, Numidians, and Moors, who inhabited the coast region from East to West. These were early subjected to alien influences, the greatest of which, before the coming of the Roman, was the advent of the Semite. The second is shown by the vast aggregate of tribes which form a curve along the south from the ocean to the Cyrenaica. These tribes, which were called by the common name of Gaetuli, were almost exempt from European influences in historic, and probably in prehistoric, times. A few intermingled with the Aethiopians of the Sahara,[858] but, taken as a whole, they are believed to represent the primitive race of brown Saharic dwellers in all its purity.

Had the term Nomad or Numidian been applied to the southern races, the designation might have been justified by the migratory character of their life. But it is more than questionable whether the designation is defensible as applied to the people to whom it is usually attached. The Numidians do not seem to have possessed either the character or habits of a genuinely nomadic people such as the Arabs.[859] They lived in huts and not in tents. These huts (_mapalia_), which had the form of an upturned boat, may have seemed a poor habitation to Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans; but, as habitations, they were meant to be permanent; they were an index of the possession of property, of a lasting attachment to the soil. The village formed by a group of these little homes cl.u.s.tering round a steep height, was a still further index of a political and military society that intended to maintain and defend the area on which it had settled. The pages of Sall.u.s.t give ample evidence of an active village life engrossed with the toils of agriculture, and the ma.s.s of the population of the region of the Tell must have been for a long time fixed to the soil which yielded it a livelihood. Elsewhere there was indeed need of something like periodic migration. On the high plateaux pastoral life made the usual change from summer to winter stations necessary. But this regulated movement does not correspond strictly to the desultory life of a truly nomadic people. Yet it is easy to see how, in contrast to the regular and often sedentary mercantile life of the Phoenician and the Greek, that of the Numidian might be considered wild and migratory. He was in truth a ”trekker” rather than a nomad, and he possessed the invaluable military attributes of the man unchained by cities and accustomed to wander far in a hard and bracing country. A skill in horsemans.h.i.+p 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.

It is less easy to reconstruct the moral and political attributes of this people from the data which we at present possess, or to reconcile the experience of to-day with the impressions of ancient historians. But so permanent has been the great bulk of the population of Northern Africa that it is tempting to interpret the ancient Numidian in the light of the modern Kabyle. One who has had experience of the latter endows him with an intelligent head, a frank and open physiognomy and a lively eye, describes him as active and enterprising, lively and excitable, possessed of moral pride, eminently truthful, a stern holder of his plighted word and a respecter of women--a respect shown by the general practice of monogamy.[860] Even when stirred to war he is said not to lend himself to unnecessary cruelty.[861] The activity, liveliness and excitability of this people may be traced in the accounts of antiquity; but Roman records would add the impression of duplicity, treachery and cruelty as characteristics of the race. Yet as these characteristics are exhibited in the record of a great national war against a hated invader, and are chiefly ill.u.s.trated in the persons of a king or his ministers--individuals spoilt by power or maddened by fear--we need not perhaps attach too much importance to the discrepancy between the evidence of the ancient and modern world.

Much of the history of Numidia, especially during the epoch of the war of the Romans against Jugurtha, would be illuminated if we could interpret the political tendencies of its ancient inhabitants by those of the Kabyle of modern times. The latter is said to be a st.u.r.dy democrat, founding his society on the ideas of equality and individuality. Each member of this society enjoys the same rights and is bound down to the same duties. There is no military or religious n.o.bility, there are no hereditary chiefs. The affairs of the society, about which all can speak or vote, are administered by simple delegates.[862] There is nothing in the history of the war with Jugurtha to belie these characteristics, there is much which confirms them. In the narrative of that war there is no mention of a n.o.bility. The influential men described are simply those who have been elevated by wealth or familiarity with the king. The monarchy itself is a great power where the king is present, but the life of the community is not broken when the king is a fugitive; and loyalty to the crown centres round a great personality, who is expected to drive the hated invaders into the sea, not merely round the name of a legitimate dynasty.

Monarchy, in fact, seems a kind of artificial product in Numidia; but, artificial as it may have been, it had done good work. An active reign of more than fifty years by a man who united the absolutism of the savage potentate with the wisdom and experience of the civilised ruler, had produced effects in Numidia that could never die, Masinissa had proved what Numidian agriculture might become under the guidance of scientific rules by the creation of model farms, whose fertile acres showed that cultivated plants of every kind could be grown on native soil;[863] while under his rule and that of his son Micipsa the life of the city showed the same progress as that of the country. Numidia could not become one of the granaries of the world without its capital rising to the rank of a great commercial city. Cirta, though situated some forty-eight Roman miles from the sea,[864] was soon sought by the Greeks, those ubiquitous bankers of the Mediterranean world,[865] while Roman and Italian capitalists eagerly plied their business in this new and attractive sphere which had been presented to their efforts by the conquests of Rome and the civilising energy of its native rulers.

The kingdom of Numidia suffered from a weakness common to monarchies where the strong spirits of subjects and local chiefs can be controlled only by the still stronger hand of the central potentate, and where the practice of polygamy and concubinage in the royal house sometimes gave rise to many pretenders but to no heir with an indefeasible claim to rule. There was no settled principle of succession to the throne, and the death of the sovereign for the time being threatened the peace or unity of the kingdom, while it entailed grave responsibilities upon its nominal protector. Masinissa himself had been excluded from the throne by an uncle,[866] and but for his vigour and energy might have remained the subject of succeeding pretenders.

A crisis was threatened at his own decease but was happily averted by the prudence of the dying monarch. Loath as he probably was to acknowledge the supremacy of Rome, he thrust on her the invidious task of deciding the succession to the throne. He felt that Roman authority would be more effective than paternal wishes; perhaps he saw that amongst his sons there was not one who could be trusted alone and unaided to continue to build up the fortunes of the state and to claim recognition from his brothers as their undisputed lord, while the show of submission to Rome might weaken the vigilance and disarm the jealousy of the protecting power. Scipio was summoned to his deathbed to apportion the kingdom between the legitimate sons who survived him, Micipsa, Gulussa and Mastanabal.[867] To Micipsa was given the capital Cirta, the royal palace and the general administration of the kingdom, the warlike Gulussa was made commander-in-chief, while to Mastanabal the youngest was a.s.signed the task of directing the judicial affairs of the dominion.[868] This division of authority was soon disturbed by the death of the two younger brothers, and Micipsa was left alone to indulge his peaceful inclinations during a long and uneventful reign of nearly thirty years. The fall of Carthage had left him free from all irritating external relations; for the King of Numidia was no longer required to act the part of a constant spy on the actions, and an occasional trespa.s.ser on the territory, of the greatest of African powers. The nearest scene of disturbance was the opposite continent of Spain, and here he did Rome good service by sending her a.s.sistance against Viriathus and the Numantines.[869] Unvexed by troubles within his borders, Micipsa devoted his life to the arts of peace. He beautified Cirta and attracted Greek settlers to the town, amongst them men of arts and learning, who delighted the king with their literary and philosophic discourse.[870]

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