The Chief Periods of European History. Freeman Edward Augustus
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of all history, I then ventured to say, had been determined by the geological fact that certain hills by the Tiber were lower and nearer together than the other hills of Latium. If I were lecturing on Roman history as such, instead of taking a glance of a moment, a glance of a mere thousand years or so, at Rome in her œcumenical position, I might carry out this thought into great detail. For my present purpose it is enough to say that the central spot of the central peninsula was naturally called to headship. We might point out that the process which made Lugubalium and Nisibis bulwarks of Rome began when the Palatine and the Capitoline hills were girded by a single wall. But it is enough for us to mark the great steps in the advance of the Roman power, the steps which made her the head of Latium, the head of Italy, the head of the West, the head, and in the end the mistress, of the Mediterranean world. In all these stages we must ever bear in mind that the rule of Rome was in the fullest sense the rule of a city, a rule of essentially the same kind as the rule of other ruling cities before and after. It was distinguished from the rule of Athens, Sparta, Carthage, Bern, and Venice only by the vastness of the scale to which the rule of the Roman city extended, and by the process, unparalleled in the history of any other city, by which the franchise of the ruling commonwealth was gradually extended to all its allies and subjects. Latium, Italy, the Mediterranean world, were merged bit by bit, not only in the Roman dominion but in the Roman city, till every Italian ally, every Greek confederate, even every barbarian provincial, had become a citizen of Rome. It is true that the last stage of the process did not take place till to be a citizen of Rome simply meant to be a subject of Rome’s master. It has been doubted, with no small show of reason, whether the edict of Antoninus Caracalla was not an immediate loss rather than an immediate gain to those whom it admitted to the full honours of the Roman name. But the eye of universal history looks at the change in another light. The edict of Antoninus, whatever its immediate motives, whatever its immediate results, did in the end create an artificial Roman nation throughout the Roman dominion, at any rate from the Ocean to Mount Tauros. Every freeman throughout the Empire had now a right in the name and traditions of Rome. We see the results of this change in the men of the fifth and sixth centuries, in those Romans of Gaul and Spain who knew no national name, no national being, save that of the city to which their forefathers had bowed. We see its yet more lasting results in the Romans and the Romania of the East, in the Greek-speaking folk from whom the Roman name has not yet wholly passed away, in the Latin-speaking folk to whom in our own day the Roman name has again become the living badge of their regenerate being.
On Rome then, as head of Europe in a sense in which no other among the powers of Europe ever reached that headship, the two duties of a great European power were laid in a fulness in which they were never laid on any other. Rome was called on, before all others, to be the teacher of nations of her own European stock, to be the champion of Europe against the inroads of barbarians from without. In the former character her teaching had sometimes to be sharp; she had often to wield the rod of as stern a discipline as that with which Gideon taught the men of Succoth. It was the mission of Rome to make the Gaul the partaker of her tongue and culture. It was her mission to make the Teuton the heir of one half of her political power. She was to frame out of his stores and her own a third state of things distinct from either of the elements that went to frame it. Of the union of Teuton and Roman sprang the world of modern Europe. But for that union the nations had to bide their time; as in the games of Hellas, they that rose before the happy moment were scourged back again. They who came as invaders only had to be dealt with as invaders and not as disciples. The Gaul who came before his time had his scourging at Sentinum; the Teuton who came before his time had his scourging at Aquæ Sextiæ and Vercellæ. But how well the work was done with Gauls and Teutons who better knew their time and place, we see when the Gaul Sidonius paints in his Roman speech the portrait of one Theodoric, Gothic lord of a Roman realm; we see it when a greater Theodoric, Gothic lord of a mightier Roman realm, legislates from his throne at Ravenna for the welfare of Rome’s earliest Gaulish province. Here was one side of the mission of the head of Europe, the teacher of the kindred nations. Her other side as European champion, as foremost representative of the Eternal cause, stands forth in her long warfare with the Carthaginian, the Persian, the Arab, and the Turk. And both sides stand forth together when Rome, lady of the nations, marches forth with her Teutonic comitatus round her to meet the hosts of Attila. The work was well in doing when Anianus looked from the walls of Orleans on the banners of deliverance, Roman and Gothic, flocking side by side, in the strife when Roman, Goth, and Frank, Catholic, Aryan, and heathen, joined to deal the final blow for the common European soil on the day of slaughter in the Catalaunian fields.
How the Latin city of Rome marched to the headship of Latium, how the head of Latium marched to the headship of Italy, are matters of Roman rather than of universal history. The œcumenical calling of Rome comes upon her as soon as she has become the head of Italy, perhaps more strictly in the very moment of her becoming such. She is not fully head of Italy till she has beaten back the invader from Epeiros from the shores of her peninsula. But her war with Pyrrhos had brought her into the thick of the Greek world and all its complications. Unless we accept the tales of her earlier dealings with Massalia, Rome has not yet sought either Greek allies or Greek enemies beyond the bounds of Italy. But Greece, in the person of her foremost champion, had come to seek out Rome within those bounds. The fight of Beneventum ruled that Italy should be Italian; it ruled that no Greek power should arise in Western Europe to balance the realms of Ptolemy and Seleukos in the East. It ruled in short that the head of Italy should be Rome. The wars which Rome had waged against the Samnite and the Gaul had made her beyond all comparison the first power in Italy. The war with Pyrrhos, the war that threatened to make Italy, like Asia or Egypt, part of a Greek dominion, made her the undoubted head.
The head of Italy now stood forth as one of the great powers of the world. It marks one of the differences between the political state of those days and that of our own that Rome had no sooner undoubtedly risen to this position than she found herself engaged in a struggle, a struggle well nigh for life and death, with the other great power of the Western Mediterranean. In the modern world, whatever jealousies, controversies, wars, may arise between any of the great powers of Europe, none seeks the utter destruction of any other, none seeks the abiding weakening of any other, its degradation from the rank of a great power. But the establishment of Rome as the undoubted head of Italy, as one of the two greatest powers of the West, at once condemned her to abiding rivalry with the other power, a rivalry which might be salved over by this or that interval of peace, but which meant that, sooner or later, either Rome or Carthage must perish. We must remember that, while between any other two of the great wars of Rome there was some slight interval of peace, the war with Pyrrhos and the Italian allies of Pyrrhos was followed without any break whatever by the first war with Carthage. That war was the War for Sicily. On any theory of natural boundaries, a power that was the head of Italy might reasonably, so far as there is reason in such matters, expect to spread its dominion over the lands within the Alps, and over the three great islands which look like natural appendages to the peninsula of Italy. And a power which spread itself over the lands within the Alps, a power which from its own shores could look out on the mountains of Illyricum, could hardly expect to keep itself wholly unentangled by the affairs of the lands on the other side of Hadria. Rome then had hardly become the head of Italy before two fields of action were opened for her without a breathing-space. She had to strive with the other great power of the West, and signs were not wanting that before long her destiny would call her to mingle in the strifes of Eastern Europe also.
The Western call was the earlier and the nearer. Close on the war with Pyrrhos followed the War for Sicily, the war of more than twenty years waged mainly on the waters by the fleets of Rome and Carthage. As a war for Sicily, as one of the greatest of the many wars for Sicily, it takes its place in the long range of cycles which make up the history of that illustrious island. Rome now for the first time buckled on her harness to play her part in dealing with the Eternal Question. Was the greatest of Mediterranean islands to be a part of Europe or of Africa, to be a possession of Aryan or of Semitic man, to be the home of the gods of Alba and Olympos or of the Moloch and Baalim of the men of Canaan? The Greek had waged the warfare for ages; the fates had gone against him; the realm of Hierôn was but a small survival of the days when Sicily had come so near to being a purely Hellenic island. The calling for which Syracuse was too weak passed on to the stronger hand of Rome. Panormos, won for Europe for eleven hundred years, was no mean first-fruits of the strife.