Empire of the Romans from Julius

Caesar to Justinian: Six Hundred Years

of Peace and War, Volume I: A History
John Matthews
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Preface
List of Maps
List of Figures
Part I: Building an Empire
1 Introduction: The Roman Republic and its Discontents
2 The Tragedy of Julius Caesar
3 Caesar’s Heir
4 A New Order
5 Succession, and the Nature of the Imperial Office
6 The Julio‐Claudian Dynasty: Loyalty and Dissent
Bibliographical Notes to Part I: Building an
EmpireBibliographical Notes to Part I: Building an Empire
Chapter 1: The Roman Republic and its Discontents
Chapter 2: The Tragedy of Julius Caesar
Chapter 3: Caesar’s Heir
Chapter 4: The New Order
Chapter 5: Succession, and the Nature of the Imperial Office
Chapter 6: The Julio‐Claudian Dynasty: Loyalty and Dissent
Part II: Pax Romana: “A Polite and Powerful Empire”
7 Frontiers and Provinces
7.1 Wars and Frontiers
7.2 Provinces and Romanisation
8 From Flavians to Severi
9 Age of the Antonines
9.1 Economic Growth and the Sources of Wealth
 9.2 The Origins of the Governing Classes
9.3 Literature and Literacy
9.4 Developments in Roman Law
9.5 Health and Mortality
9.6 Epilogue: A “Slow and Secret Poison”?
10 Religious Change and Early Christianity
Bibliographical Notes to Part II: “A Polite and Powerful
Empire”Bibliographical Notes to Part II: “A Polite and Powerful
Empire”
Chapter 7: Frontiers and Provinces
Chapter 8: From Flavians to Severi
Chapter 9: The Age of the Antonines
Chapter 10: Religious change and early Christianity
Part III: Rising to the Challenge
11 Into an Age of Iron
12 Political Change and the Economy
13 Diocletian and the Tetrarchy
Bibliographical Notes to Part III: Rising to the
ChallengeBibliographical Notes to Part III: Rising to the
Challenge
Chapter 11: Into an Age of Iron
Chapter 12: Political Change and the Roman Economy
Chapter 13: Diocletian and the Tetrarchy
Part IV: A New Empire
14 The Ascendancy of Constantine
15 Cities of Constantine: Constantinople, Rome, Jerusalem
15.1 Constantinople: A New Capital
15.2 Rome: The Old World
15.3 Jerusalem: A New Ideology
16 The House of Constantine
17 Julian, Hellenism, and Christianity
 18 Christianity and Roman Society
19 The Late Roman State
20 Rome and the Barbarian World
Bibliographical Notes to Part IV: A New EmpireBibliographical
Notes to Part IV: A New Empire
Chapter 14: The Ascendancy of Constantine
Chapter 15: Cities of Constantine: Constantinople. Rome,
Jerusalem
Chapter 16: The House of Constantine
Chapter 17: Julian, Hellenism, and Christianity
Chapter 18: Christianity and Roman Society
Chapter 19: The Late Roman State
Part V: Facing the Future
21 The Fall of Rome
22 Into a Post‐Roman World
23 East and West after the Fall of Rome
24 Royalty at Ravenna
25 Dialogues with the Past: The Reign of Justinian
26 Retrospective
Bibliographical Notes to Part V: Facing the
FutureBibliographical Notes to Part V: Facing the Future
Chapter 20: Rome and the Barbarian World
Chapter 21: The Fall of Rome
Chapter 22: Into a Post‐Roman World
Chapter 23: East and West after the Fall of Rome
Chapter 24: Royalty at Ravenna
Chapter 25: Dialogues with the Past: the Reign of Justinian
Chapter 26: Retrospective
Abbreviations and Short Titles
Bibliographical References
References to Part I: Building an Empire
 References to Part II: Pax Romana: “A Polite and Powerful
Empire”
References to Part III: Rising to the Challenge
References to Part IV: A New Empire
References to Part V: Facing the Future
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Part 1
Map 1.1 The Mediterranean World.
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1 Roman soldiers as builders and laborers: distant
descendants of “...
Chapter 4
Map 4.1 The Roman Provinces in 14 CE
Figure 4.1 The late Republican and Augustan forum area.
Figure 4.2 The 13th century obelisk of Sethos I and Rameses
II was imported ...
Figure 4.3 The Altar of Augustan Peace: detail of Augustan
family.
Figure 4.4 The Augustan and post‐Augustan Campus
Martius. For the location o...
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1 The Mausoleum of Augustus in the Campus
Martius, as it appeared, ...
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1 Events and policies in the coinage.1–4 The sea‐
power of Sextus ...
Figure 6.2 Claudius’ harbor as seen in the Peutinger Map, a
thirteenth‐centu...
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1 “Temple to Neptune and Minerva for the well‐
being of the sacred i...
Figure 7.2 Maiden Castle, Dorset, (aerial photograph by
Major George Allen, ...
 Figure 7.3 The “Maison Carrée” in Nemausus (Nîmes) in
southern Gaul, seen in...
Figure 7.4 The so‐called “Temple of Janus” (more probably
Mars or Celtic equ...
Figure 7.5 The triple “déesses‐mères” (matronae, goddesses
of plenty) of Gal...
Figure 7.6 The central feature of the pediment of the temple
of Sul‐Minerva ...
Chapter 8
Map 8.1 The Roman Provinces in the Time of Trajan
Figure 8.1 The Rhine‐Danube Frontier under the Flavians
and Antonines.
Figure 8.2 a, b Trajan’s Column showing the two Dacian
campaigns of Trajan, ...
Figure 8.3 Contemporary portrait of the Severan family,
shown in imperial re...
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1 The street plan of Graeco‐Roman Naples as
preserved in the modern...
Figure 9.2 The Alcantára bridge over the river Tagus in
south‐western Spain ...
Figure 9.3 Scene from a pharmacist’s or general store, in a
funerary relief ...
Figure 9.4 Picture of a smithy, in a funerary relief from
Aquileia.
Chapter 11
Figure 11.1 Imperial images of the later third and early
fourth century as t...
Chapter 12
Figure 12.1 Scene of moneychangers on a funerary relief
from Neumagen (Novio...
Chapter 13
Figure 13.1 Tetrarchic Chronology 284–313.
Figure 13.2 The Tetrarchic units styled Ioviani and
Herculiani, as they appe...
Figure 13.3 Two of the (presumed) Tetrarchs, portrayed in
the sculptured gro...
Chapter 14
Figure 14.1 The east façade of the palace of Diocletian at
Split.
Figure 14.2 Chronology of Constantine, 305‐30.
Figure 14.3 (a) Arch of Constantine, north façade. Source:
Alto Vintage Imag...
Chapter 15
Figure 15.1 Constantinople in the Peutinger Map, §8a
(detail).
Figure 15.2 The Forum of Constantine as shown (East face,
register 1) in six...
Figure 15.3 Distribution of churches in fourth‐ and fifth‐
century Rome.
Figure 15.4 Old St. Peter’s, threatened by the construction
of Michelangelo’...
Figure 15.5 The Madaba map mosaic.
Chapter 16
Figure 16.1 (a) Constantius Augustus and (b) Gallus Caesar,
shown as consuls...
Chapter 17
Figure 17.1 Hero of Alexandria, Katoptrika 18.
Chapter 19
Map 19.1 The Roman Provinces from the Severans to
Diocletian
 Figure 19.1 (a) The insignia of the praetorian prefect of Italy
as they appe...
Chapter 20
Figure 20.1 Roman coins in Gothia,, late third to early fifth
centuries.
Figure 20.2 A herding community living in peace, as seen in
rock drawings in...
Chapter 21
Figure 21.1 Ivory diptych of Theodosius with his wife
Serena, daughter of an...
Figure 21.2 “Count of Italy” (comes Italiae) as it appears in
the Notitia Di...
Chapter 22
Map 22.1 The Roman World, c. 500
Chapter 23
Figure 23.1 The church of Santa Maria Maggiore at Rome,
as seen by Giovanni ...
Chapter 24
Figure 24.1 The personal monograms of Odoacer (left) and
Theoderic (right) f...
Figure 24.2 The mausoleum of Theoderic at Ravenna, with
the monolithic roof ...
Chapter 25
Figure 25.1 The Hippodrome, as illustrated in the
posthumous work De Ludis C...
Figure 25.2 Longitudinal (E./W.) cross‐section of the
church of S. Sophia, s...
Figure 25.3 Drawing of an imperial horseman, from a
fifteenth‐century manusc...
Figure 25.4 Mosaic of the Empress Theodora in the church
of San Vitale at Ra...
Chapter 26
Map 26.1 The Empire of Justinian
VOLUME I
A HISTORY
Empire of the Romans
From Julius Caesar to Justinian:
Six Hundred Years of Peace and War
JOHN MATTHEWS
This edition first published 2021
© 2021 John F. Matthews
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data
Name: Matthews, John (John Frederick), author.
Title: Empire of the Romans : from Julius Caesar to Justinian: six hundred years of peace
and war / John Matthews.
Other titles: From Julius Caesar to Justinian: six hundred years of peace and war
Description: Hoboken, NJ : Wiley‐Blackwell, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020026857 (print) | LCCN 2020026858 (ebook) | ISBN
9781444334562 (v.1 ; paperback) | ISBN 9781444334586 (v.2 ; paperback) | ISBN
9781119481546 (v.2 ; adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119481560 (v.2 ; epub) | ISBN 9781119610311
(v.1 ; adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119610359 (v.1 ; epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Rome–History–Empire, 30 B.C.‐284 A.D. | Rome–Civilization. | Rome–
History–Empire, 30 B.C.‐284 A.D.–Sources. | Rome–Civilization–Sources.
Classification: LCC DG270 .M364 2020 (print) | LCC DG270 (ebook) | DDC 937/.06–dc23
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Preface
The appearance of yet another book on the Roman empire invites a
few words of explanation. Many good books exist already, and keep
appearing – rightly so, for it is a very good subject, and an important
one. The history of Rome makes up a substantial portion of the
history of western culture, and its linguistic, cultural, and legal
influences persist. The span of time from the legendary foundation of
Rome in 753 BCE to the death of the emperor Justinian in 565 CE is
not far short of that from the death of Justinian to the present day,
an observation that has still more in its favour if one takes the date of
the first Olympic Games in 776 BCE as the beginning of Greek, and
so of Graeco‐Roman history (admittedly they took some time to
converge). In some ways, this is a still more appropriate moment of
definition, for it also marks the period of time in which the Greeks
adopted the system of writing, the origin of our own, that would
enable them to record their own history and in due course that of the
Romans, under whom many of their finest writers lived. This book
takes as its starting point an event that is as much a part of Greek as
of Roman history, as recorded by a Greek author writing under the
Roman empire, and moves on to the analyses offered by an earlier
Greek historian on the Romans who were coming to dominate his
world; and it ends with the descriptions given by the last Classical
Greek historian, of Justinian’s attempts to restore that Roman world
as it had once been. The Romans had their own historians, and their
own ways of writing, but it is significant that a history of the Roman
empire can be framed by the writings of Greek observers of it. The
Greeks were there first and they were around for longer.
The Roman empire is also a time of which we have substantial
knowledge – not such as to stand comparison with the mountains of
documentation for the history of the modern world, but nevertheless
incorporating evidence of many different sorts, physical as well as
literate, permitting the re‐creation of a world of great sophistication
and variety. It is a world that encourages different conceptions
among those who write about it and their public; and that this public
ranges far beyond the academic is evident from published lists of
current and new books.
One may still ask what are the points of difference that mark a new
book on such a well‐established subject. The first question, which
faces the historian of any period, is that of range; where will it begin
and end? As to the former, we should take for granted that any book
on the Roman empire will acknowledge the political and social
antecedents of the Republican period. We must however be careful.
The end of nearly half a millennium of “Republican” government in
the first century BCE does not signal the end of “res publica” in its
broader sense; that array of political, social and legal institutions that
belonged to the domain of public authority. However breached in the
observance, the distinction between public authority and private
power was one insisted upon by the founder of imperial government,
after the end of the civil wars that destroyed the Republic. Augustus
and his successors may have expressed themselves differently as to
what they had done with “res publica,” but none of them would have
claimed its abolition. As late as 533, in publishing his Digest of
Roman law, Justinian referred to the emperor’s duty, whenever an
unexpected contingency might arise not covered by law, “to correct
and settle it and to subject it to suitable procedures and regulations,”
citing in support a famous jurist of the early second century. There
were “tyrannical” emperors, but the Roman empire was not a
tyranny.
Whether a continuation of “res publica” in this broader sense was the
only possible framework for a solution to the problems of the late
Republic is an interesting question, but it was the solution that was
adopted, and I have taken it to justify an introductory chapter on the
political difficulties of the last two centuries BCE. There will be little
here to surprise readers familiar with the history of the late Republic.
Nor have I tried to invent surprises, but a book on the Roman empire
would be incomplete without such an introduction to the system that
it replaced.
If all presentations of the Roman empire will share an interest in the
history of the Republic, there is more diversity to be found in their
terminal points. How, when, and in what circumstances did the
Roman empire come to an end? This is a very large question and it
will cause no surprise to find a variety of answers to it; a process of
disintegration will always be less orderly than a process of growth. It
will be harder to describe and will invite different points of emphasis,
as the ancient sources themselves lose their sense of direction, and
modern writers take different views as to what point the
disintegration has reached, and whether what is left should count as
Roman. There are also more prosaic reasons; I have heard of cases
where a lecture course has come to an end simply because time has
run out on the lecturer, as if the Roman world had declined and
fallen for the convenience of the syllabus.
Choices have to be made, but it is still worth noticing how the
terminal point of a history may imply a judgment as to what is
important. The decision to end a book on the Roman empire with the
beginnings of Diocletian’s Tetrarchy in the 280s may invite us to
conclude that what follows is part of a different, late Roman or even
early medieval story (and medieval histories do often begin at this
point). It is true that what follows in the fourth century shows
important differences from what precedes – including a vastly
increased scale of documentation on a far wider range of issues. Yet,
it is not too much to say that the outcome of a generation’s research
on the later Roman period has been to show how the empire of the
fourth century was more Classical than Medieval. Neither Ammianus
Marcellinus nor Claudian nor Procopius (nor indeed Jerome or
Augustine) was a medieval writer, the Theodosian Code was a book
of Roman law, while those political and social changes that make the
later period seem so different from the earlier may also be
understood as conditions for the survival of the Roman world and its
culture.
A book that ended with the death of Constantine in 337 might ask us
to believe that a Christian empire is so at odds with the story of
Classical Rome as to require separate consideration, a choice that
sets aside the fascinating story of how the Classical and Christian
elements in Constantine’s empire responded to each other. To
proceed further, a terminal point of 395 will reflect the idea that an
empire divided between eastern and western governments is a new
situation requiring a new treatment, but this does less than justice to
the elements of an east‐west distinction in the Roman empire that
had long existed and, in the second century, had proved immensely
fertile before it ever became a burden. Byzantine history has very
deep roots in the Classical world. The Sack of Rome of 410, and the
deposition of the last Roman emperor in 476 again offer defensible
terminal points, based in these cases upon events of symbolic rather
than substantive value; so too the execution of the Roman Boethius
by Theoderic the Ostrogoth. These are all moments to stop for
reflection and for wondering what may be the shape of things to
come.
This book goes beyond all of them to end with the death of Justinian
in 565, recognising both that emperor’s determination to restore the
empire of the past, and the work of the last truly Classical historian,
Procopius of Caesarea, in documenting the failure of the attempt. A
good case could be made for continuing to the first Arab conquests in
the Byzantine domains in the early seventh century, but at some
point one has to leave it to someone else to carry on. The sensitivities
and techniques of the Classical historian are durable but they do not
last for ever, and one’s sense of the declining force of familiar
methods of analysis is not a bad guide to the moment when the
Classical world has ended.
Novelists sometimes remark that, once imagined, characters in a
novel will choose for themselves what they do, what will happen to
them and how they will respond to it. In an odd sort of way (since his
characters’ futures are already in the past), the same is true of the
historian. Though without a novelist’s freedom, the historian will
have imagined his story in a certain way and its characters will have
chosen what will happen to them. Having found its logic, a book will
tend to carry on as it has started: which is to say that its character
will have become ingrained quite early in the process of composition.
It will also reflect a number of more personal and subjective
considerations, first among which is the nature of a historian’s own
past research, which will have provided familiarity with certain fields
of study and types of source rather than others, and a corresponding
sense of what is important. I have done my best to allow for these
differences, but they will show. Style and manner are also a personal
matter on which judgments have to be made; how to balance the
detail with the flow of the narrative, the individual experience with
the great movement; how to integrate narrative and digression; what
level of detail is appropriate; how far to pursue the sub‐plot.
Excessive detail without context is tedious, but so, in my experience,
are even the most profound generalities if they lack focus on the
particular.
I have attempted to tell the story continuously, and to follow its
changing features through transitions and across turning‐points that
might otherwise divide it; what may at first appear as a challenge to
the Roman empire may in the end turn out to be what allows it to
carry on. The Romans measured their history in centuries – the time
of Augustus is as remote from that of Justinian as the Wars of the
Roses are from us, and those wars were already a century old when
Shakespeare wrote of the last of them – and they had a strong sense
of an evolving history emerging from the past. It is a moment of
surprise when Ammianus Marcellinus refers to Domitian and to the
figure whom he styles Octavianus Augustus, as emperors “of olden
times”, until one realizes that he is looking back three and four
hundred years from his own day.
The story unfolds through an interplay of narrative and digression;
history is not timeless, and whatever the importance of the broader
socio‐economic and cultural issues at stake and with whatever
success they have been described, we do need to know where we are.
The combination of approaches is accommodated in a rather large
number of relatively compact chapters, grouped in sections to help
bring out the shape of the argument as it moves forward. Yet this is
not, considering its subject, an especially long book, and there has at
all points been a question of selection with its surly companion, the
omission of things that should have been included. I have often
realized, in reading through drafts of its later chapters, that
something should have been said earlier about topics that arise in
them. There is a sense in which, in a society sufficiently conscious of
its past to want to write about it, all history is concurrent, running
together in the memory. The whole thing is in the mind together, and
one of the skills that the historian has to learn is how to present
concurrent issues in sequence; to have them appear at the right
moment. As Edward Gibbon understood, the future problems of the
Roman empire can already be seen in the Golden Age of the second
century. It is only in a Hollywood movie that one would actually put
its fall in that period, but it is still appropriate, if it can be done
without distraction, to mention at the moment of their earlier
appearances, matters that will become important later. It was
Tacitus’ habit to characterize upon their first appearance figures who
would become important later in his history, a practice that certainly
helps to sharpen one’s expectations of the future.
Finally, I have tried to give a sense of the primary material on which
the story is based, and for this I need to say a few words about the
companion volume of this book. Volume Two: Select Anthology
offers a complementary selection of texts running in parallel with the
main divisions of the present volume, chosen also to broaden its
range, and able, with its introductions and commentaries, to be used
as a free‐standing work. It will sometimes document something said
in the present Volume, but more often will offer a broader,
sometimes more subjective impression, or offer a shift of viewpoint,
as, one might say, from the makers of history to the users of it. I try
in the Anthology to balance texts of different types – literary authors
with documentary, legal and epigraphic materials, papyrus records,
letters and so on – with a special interest in texts that express
themselves in the first person or reflect individual experiences. I pay
relatively little attention to standard historians such as Tacitus or
Suetonius or Ammianus Marcellinus, not because I do not respect
these writers (a 600‐page book on one of them should be sufficient
proof of that) but because they are available in inexpensive modern
translations with excellent introductions, and also because once an
ancient historian gets at his material he is no longer a primary source
in the strict sense, but an observer with an opinion. I have chosen
extracts from historians only when they have some personal or other
particular relationship to the events they describe.
I do not want readers coming to the Roman empire, especially if it is
for the first time, to be overawed by the panoply of learning that has
been devoted to it. It is however important to respect the evidential
materials on which our understanding is based. My practice has been
to refer in the text to an ancient writer who is directly addressed in it;
there is no need to send a reader scurrying off into footnotes to track
down a simple reference that can be given in the text without
disturbing the appearance of the page. I have similarly added a cross‐
reference to Volume Two when a relevant text appears there with its
own commentary. I have also, in a series of chapter‐by‐chapter
bibliographical essays, given more detailed documentation, with
indications of the modern writing that I have appreciated. These
essays have two aims: to give support to statements not directly
documented in the text and more generally to help explain why I say
what I do; and to guide the reader to the further literature that may
be found interesting. I am aware of treading a fine line between the
first of these aims (for which they are certainly too little) and the
second (for which they are probably too much). There is nothing
easier in historical writing than to pile up bibliographies. All I can do
is to share my sense of admiration when I read publishers’ lists, or
reviews of recent books, or talk with colleagues, or stroll among the
shelves of a Classical library, and realise how much there is to know.
I apologise to those colleagues whose work I should have mentioned
but have not, either because I am not as familiar with it as I should
be or have found no occasion to do so when I should have done,
while assuring them that I do know what it feels like to be neglected.
I am also familiar with books and articles that cite one’s own work
without any indication that they are actually familiar with it – the
ecology of footnotes is a submarine realm, in which ideas may
survive and pass on their genes without ever appearing in the upper
world. This book is an introduction to its subject, and I shall be
content if it leads readers to the current research that opens new
perspectives and novel approaches to what had been thought
familiar or was lesser known. It is not a book about network theory,
or demography, or climate or disease, though I am full of admiration
for the work that is being done in these and other areas, and
appreciate that a synthesis of the results of this work, if it is ever
made, may produce a Roman empire that looks very different from
the one we understand at present.
The Bibliographies to both volumes, it will be noticed, are almost
entirely composed of works in English. The primary reason for this is
of course their intended public; the last thing the reader wants is to
be blown out of the water by a cannonade of writing in languages
with which he or she may be unfamiliar. It must also be said that for
a book with such a chronological and topical range as this one it
would be bordering on insanity to review everything covered in it, in
every language in which a topic has been covered. My own teacher
Peter Brown commented in 1967 on published bibliographies on St.
Augustine, respectively of 988 and (annually) 400 titles (Augustine
of Hippo, p. 10 n. 1). One only has to project these figures to the
Roman empire as a whole in all its fields, to see how impossible it
would be to cover everything that has been written on it.
I would add a note of recommendation to a form of scholarly
literature that the reader will notice in the bibliographical essays; the
multi‐authored Companions and Handbooks on selected themes that
have appeared from various publishers over recent years: to mention
only what comes to mind, there are Companions or Handbooks to
the Roman Empire itself and to Greek and Roman Historiography,
Greek and Roman Coinage, Roman Britain, the Age of Constantine,
Saint Augustine, the Age of Attila (a disconcerting title, but a very
useful book), the Age of Justinian. On a more modest scale and each
by a single author, there are surveys of the literary sources for Greek
and Roman history, Roman law, the uses of papyri, the coinage and
epigraphic evidence. Well‐organised and edited, and with well‐
chosen authors and contributors, these books are extremely useful in
conveying a sense of the present state of a subject, especially for
those who like their historical reading to reflect the diverse interests
and styles of the writers who contribute to it.
In a fortunate academic career, I have been able to pursue research
and teaching as related activities in two great universities, Oxford
and Yale, and I extend my sincerest thanks to both of them. It was an
early part of my good fortune that I came to know the giants of the
profession, A.H.M. Jones, Arnaldo Momigliano, G.E.M. de Ste Croix,
E.A. Thompson, Moses Finley, Fergus Millar, Alan Cameron and
Averil Cameron, Cyril and Marlia Mango, and of course Ronald Syme
and my research supervisor, Peter Brown; not to mention Ramsay
MacMullen, for whom my admiration joins with the affection of a
personal friendship formed since I came to Yale in 1996. The passing
of time has a way of compacting the generations, and among my own
contemporaries I would mention my dear friend Peter Garnsey (with
a memorable story about his own first meeting with A.H.M. Jones),
Roger Tomlin, Timothy Barnes, John Curran, Sabine MacCormack,
Patrick Wormald, Bryan Ward‐Perkins, Ian Wood, Michael Whitby
and Mary Whitby, William Metcalf and my successor at Yale, Noel
Lenski. Among my own research students, now my colleagues, the
work of Jill Harries, David Hunt, Ray Davis, Jairus Banaji, Brian
Croke, Susanna Elm, Richard Burgess, Peter Heather, Sam Barnish,
Neil McLynn, Polymnia Athanassiadi, David Potter, Edward Watts,
Scott McGill, Josiah Osgood, Cristiana Sogno has left an abiding
impression. Of my undergraduate students over the years, let Philip
Rogerson, Neil Tunnicliffe, Roger Batty and his elder brother Martin,
Richard Stoneman, Justin Goddard, Judith Rice, Caroline Mann,
Sudhakar Nuti, Wendy Valleau and Amalia Skilton accept my thanks
on behalf of all whose work I have appreciated, and my apologies for
those whom I have failed to mention.
Authors are as familiar with the patience of publishers as publishers
are with the explanations of delay offered by authors, but there is
common ground if the purpose is to improve the result. In this case I
offer my sincere thanks to Haze Humbert and her colleagues and
successors at Messrs John Wiley for responding to my proposal of a
history of the Roman empire in this format, for continuing to
support it and for helping me through its intricacies, and to Mary
Malin and Katherine Carr for editing; and also the scholars in
various countries who were consulted and offered their suggestions.
To these colleagues, for the learning, experience and collaborative
friendship that they have offered, I am most grateful.
My debt to my beloved and gifted wife, Veronika Grimm, is an
altogether special one, impossible to express or repay. Her desire
that I should get this book finished through all its obstacles
(including my own doubts) has been a miraculous combination of
the sympathetic and the unrelenting. It is dedicated to her, to her son
and daughter, David and Vanessa, to my daughter Helen and in
loving memory of her younger sister Julia.

John Matthews,
New Haven, Connecticut
June 2020
List of Maps
Map 1.1 The Mediterranean World
Map 4.1 The Roman Provinces in 14 CE
Map 8.1 The Roman Provinces in the Time of Trajan
Map 19.1 The Roman Provinces from the Severans to Diocletian
Map 22.1 The Roman World, c. 500
Map 26.1 The Empire of Justinian
List of Figures
Figure Roman soldiers as builders and laborers: “Marius’ mules”
1.1 on Trajan’s column.
Figure The late Republican and Augustan forum area.
4.1
Figure Piazza del Popolo, Rome: obelisk of Sethos I and Rameses
4.2 II.
Figure Altar of Augustan Peace: detail of Augustan family.
4.3
Figure The Augustan and post‐Augustan Campus Martius.
4.4
Figure The mausoleum of Augustus in the Campus Martius.
5.1
Figure Events and policies in the Roman coinage.
6.1
Figure Ostia and Rome in the Peutinger Map.
6.2
Figure Dedicatory inscription of temple to Neptune and Minerva,
7.1 Chichester.
Figure Maiden Castle, Dorset.
7.2
Figure Temple of Rome and Augustus (Maison Carrée), Nîmes.
7.3
Figure Temple of Janus, at Autun.
7.4
Figure The triple “déesses‐mères” (matronae) in a relief from
7.5 central Gaul.
Figure Image of Medusa from pediment of the temple of Sulis‐
7.6 Minerva, Bath.
Figure The Rhine‐Danube Frontier under Flavians and
8.1 Antonines.
Figure Scenes from the Dacian Wars on Trajan’s column, Rome.
8.2
Figure Septimius Severus, Julia Domna and their sons in the
8.3 Berlin tondo.
Figure Naples, aerial view.
9.1
Figure Bridge over the Tagus river at Alcantára, south‐western
9.2 Spain.
Figure Scene from a pharmacist’s or general store: funerary relief
9.3 from Juliobona, northern Gaul.
Figure Blacksmith and apprentice at work: funerary relief from
9.4 Aquileia.
Figure The imperial image in the coinage, later third to early
11.1 fourth century.
Figure Scene of moneychangers: funerary relief from Neumagen.
12.1
Figure Tetrarchic Chronology 284–313.
13.1
Figure Ioviani and Herculiani in the Notitia Dignitatum.
13.2
Figure The “Venice Tetrarchs”, S. Marco, Venice.
13.3
Figure Diocletian’s palace, Split, east façade.
14.1
Figure Chronology of Constantine, 305–30.
14.2
Figure Arch of Constantine, Rome, north façade.
14.3
Figure Constantinople in the Peutinger Map.
15.1
Figure The Forum of Constantine on the Column of Arcadius.
15.2
Figure Churches in fourth‐ and fifth‐century Rome.
15.3
Figure Old and New St. Peter’s: drawing by Giovanantonio Dosio,
15.4 c. 1574.
Figure The City of Jerusalem in the Madaba Map (Jordan).
15.5
Figure Constantius and Gallus.
16.1
Figure Mirror visions: Hero of Alexandria, Katoptrika 18.
17.1
Figure Late Roman Insignia in the Notitia Dignitatum.
19.1
Figure Roman coins in Gothia, late third to early fifth centuries.
20.1
Figure A herding community living in southern Russia.
20.2
Figure Ivory diptych of Stilicho, Serena, and Eucherius.
21.1
Figure The comes Italiae in the Notitia Dignitatum.
21.2
Figure The church of Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome.
23.1
Figure The personal monograms of Odoacer and Theoderic.
24.1
Figure The mausoleum of Theoderic at Ravenna.
24.2
Figure The Hippodrome at Constantinople.
25.1
Figure Longitudinal cross‐section of the church of S. Sophia at
25.2 Constantinople.
Figure Manuscript drawing of late imperial horseman.
25.3
Figure Mosaic portrait of Theodora, church of San Vitale,
25.4 Ravenna.
Part I
Building an Empire
1 Introduction: The Roman Republic and its Discontents
2 The Tragedy of Julius Caesar
3 Caesar’s Heir
4 A New Order
5 Succession, and the Nature of the Imperial Office
6 The Julio‐Claudian Dynasty: Loyalty and Dissent

Map 1.1 The Mediterranean World.

1
Introduction: The Roman Republic and its
Discontents
The Greeks, after their country had been reduced
into a province, imputed the triumphs of Rome, not
to the merit, but to the FORTUNE, of the Republic;
… . a wiser Greek, who has composed with a
philosophic spirit the memorable history of his
own times, deprived his countrymen of this vain
and elusive comfort, by opening to their view
the deep foundations of the greatness of Rome
(Gibbon, Decline and Fall).

For those who were there, whether Greek or Roman, it was a

formative moment when the consul Titus Quinctius Flamininus
followed up his defeat of Philip V of Macedon at Kynoskephalai with a
proclamation of freedom for Hellas. The occasion, at the Isthmian
Games of 196 bce, is described by Plutarch (Life of Flamininus,
10.3ff.):
After the trumpet had signaled for all to be silent, the herald came
out before the assembly and proclaimed that the Roman senate
and Titus Quinctius Flamininus, consul and general, having
defeated King Philip and the Macedonians, granted freedom
without garrisons or taxes, and the enjoyment of their ancient
laws, to the Corinthians, Locrians, Phocians, Euboaeans, Achaeans
of Phthiotis, Magnesians, Thessalians and Perrhaebians.
At first, says Plutarch, the proclamation was not heard clearly, but
when it was repeated more loudly:
 a shout of joy arose, so loud that it reached the sea. The whole
audience rose to its feet, and paid no attention to the competing
athletes; everyone was eager to press forward to greet and hail the
savior and champion of Hellas.
So mighty the clamor, that the air was torn asunder, and ravens flying
over the stadium fell to the ground!
Flamininus’ proclamation, made on behalf of himself and the Roman
senate, is a classic example of the uses of history in the service of
politics. In declaring the end of Macedonian tyranny, it echoed the
great debates that we know from fourth‐century Athens, as
Demosthenes warned of the dangers to freedom presented by the rise
of the first great Macedonian king, Philip I. Those events were not so
very far distant (150 years is not much in the longue durée of history),
but in the meantime the reign of Philip’s son Alexander had changed
beyond recognition the shape of east Mediterranean politics. Whether
or not they realized or wanted it, the Romans were themselves the
heirs of Macedon. Their influence in mainland Greece continued to
expand and to be resisted, its true nature made apparent by their
victory at the battle of Pydna in 168, the end of the so‐called Third
Macedonian War. After the battle, the Romans dispatched to Italy
1000 of those “unfriendly” leaders of Achaean cities who had
supported Macedon, ostensibly to await trial but in effect as hostages
for their cities’ good behavior. Installed in various Italian towns, they
were left largely to their own devices. After 15 years, 700 of them had
died (many of them, leaders of their cities, must have been elderly to
start with). The rest were released, but their return home, somewhat
bearing out the Romans’ caution in detaining them, inspired a revolt
of the Achaeans and, in 146, the sacking of Corinth, their capital city.
It was another formative moment, for the sack of Corinth was in the
same year as the destruction of Carthage in what is blandly called the
Third Punic War but was provoked by the Romans specifically to
secure this outcome. The power of Carthage had been destroyed in
201, and with the defeat, ten years earlier, of the great Sicilian city of
Syracuse, Rome was now indisputably the greatest power in the
central and western Mediterranean. Her treatment of the defeated
Macedonians and Achaeans also gave her a fair claim to be the most
ruthless. It was said that in Epirus seventy cities were destroyed and
150 000 prisoners sold as slaves. But this was how wars ended; the
aftermath of the Trojan War, as described by Odysseus to his
Phaeacian hosts (Odyssey 9.39ff.), was the same, and if that example
belongs to the realm of legend there is an indubitably historical
parallel in Thucydides (5.116):
The town being now strongly besieged, there being also some that
practiced to have it given up, they yielded themselves to the
discretion of the Athenians, who slew all the men of military age,
made slaves of the women and children, and inhabited the place
with a colony sent thither afterwards of five hundred man of their
own (transl. Thomas Hobbes).
There were differences in the scale and consequences of these events.
In a sort of moral retribution for their conduct in Melos, the power of
the Athenians – beginning with the very next sentence on Thucydides
– was soon to be destroyed in Sicily while the Romans, by that
indomitable combination of virtue and fortune on which they prided
themselves, became ever more powerful.
Among the Achaean hostages sent to Italy after Pydna was the man
who became the author of what is by far the most penetrating analysis
of the history of this period; this was Polybius of Megalopolis (c. 200–
118), whose father had been a leading figure in the Achaean
Confederacy. Polybius was allowed to live in Rome, where he won
highly‐placed friendships, especially with Scipio Aemilianus,
grandson of Scipio Africanus, the victor in the second, great Punic
War of 218–201; he was with Aemilianus to witness the destruction of
Carthage in 146 – to whom else could the Romans entrust this task
than to a descendant of Hannibal’s conqueror? Polybius was a
Hellenistic intellectual, with versatile gifts, and an acerbic polemical
tone when discussing his literary rivals. In a startling initiative he was
lent some ships by Aemilianus and followed the African coast past the
Straits of Gibraltar to the Atlantic. He was with Scipio in Spain and,
an enterprise that is the envy of modern antiquarian scholarship,
traced Hannibal’s invasion route over the Alps. Interested in
geography and an explorer, he wrote a book on the habitability of the
equatorial regions. Polybius was a man of thought and action such as
the Romans liked, a political leader as well as an intellectual.
Polybius’ most famous work, and the only one to survive even in part,
is his History in 40 books, its subject the rise of Rome from the
second Punic War to the battle of Pydna – the moment when Rome’s
expansion seemed to demand from the Greeks an understanding of
their antagonists. Its purpose can be seen in two ways, one a mirror
image of the other; as an attempt to explain Rome to Greek readers,
and to explain the Romans to themselves, as an educated Greek saw
them in the context of Greek political thinking. It was not the first
history of Rome to be written, for that had been done by the Roman
Fabius Pictor, writing also in Greek, in Polybius’ early lifetime.
Polybius, however, wrote from a standpoint refined through
generations of historical writing and philosophy; the idea of history as
containing recurrent patterns with a predictive value, a process
subject to general interpretation. It is not so much that history
repeats itself, but that similar events recur over time and that one can
learn from experience, a historian’s task being to find the levels of
analysis at which these patterns can be found, and to present the
result for the instruction of those who would read it as a lesson for
their own times.
Polybius attributed Roman success to a combination of factors: the
loyalty of her allies, which gave her unparalleled resources of
manpower, her practical inventiveness, her willingness to learn from
experience, her military organization, the disciplines imposed by her
religion. He especially noted what he called her “restraint in internal
politics,” meaning that unlike other states, Rome was not disturbed
by revolution brought on by external events – as, for example, the
Athenian defeat in Sicily brought on the oligarchic revolutions of 411.
He supported this view by adducing a theory of the Roman
constitution deriving from Greek philosophical discussion as we know
it from Plato and Aristotle, but which in Polybius’ experience was
much more widely current.
The essential idea was that “constitutions” (what Greeks called
politeiai, a word for which Romans had no exact equivalent though it
yields the English “polity”), experience a cycle of changes, in a pattern
of external and internal transformations. Polybius argued his case
from first principles. In the beginning is: (i) a state of primeval chaos,
which issues into a monarchy or kingship as some great man seizes
control to impose order. After a time (ii) kingship declines into
tyranny, which in turn (iii) is replaced by aristocracy, when the “best
men” depose the tyrant through outrage at his conduct. The next
stages come about when (iv) aristocracy degrades into oligarchy, the
“rule of the best” declining into the “rule of the few” without
maintaining the same standards of integrity, and (v) when the people
take power in a democracy. In due course (vi) democracy declines
into “ochlocracy” or the rule of the mob (Greek okhlos), and (vii)
ochlocracy declines into chaos, setting off the return of the cycle. Each
form of government is transformed into its less desirable version,
which is then deposed by discontented elements in the state,
progressively becoming more and more democratic and beyond that
point, as each phase self‐destructs into the next.
It is a schematic account, though realistic at certain moments; the fall
of the monarchy at Rome could well be characterized as a transition
from a discredited tyranny to an aristocracy, for no‐one should run off
with the idea that the original Roman Republic was a democratic
institution. It is also a predictive model; by identifying the point of the
cycle reached by any particular politeia, it would be possible to
anticipate the next stage.
But Polybius was not predicting the decline of Rome, and he
introduces a new element, to break the inexorable cycle he has
described. This is the idea of the “mixed constitution,” examples of
which Polybius found at Sparta and at Rome. In such cases the
politeia does not process from better to worse in a spiral of decline,
but all elements, aristocratic and democratic, reconcile their
differences and work in harmony for the good of the community. The
theory of a “mixed constitution” has a fashionable origin in
Thucydides’ description of the Athenian constitution of the 5 000,
which briefly held power after the oligarchy of 411, as a “mixture”
(synkrasis) of the interests of the many and the few. The idea appeals
both to a philosophical instinct for moderation and to a conservative
claim to broadmindedness, but it is fallacious. The “moderate”
constitution of the 5 000 included the few who had taken part in the
oligarchic regime preceding it, but it excluded the many who had
formed the democracy that they both replaced; how could it then be a
mixture of these two components?
It is important to distinguish the idea of a mixed from that of a
balanced constitution; the first, an ideal situation in which all
interests are accommodated by a proportionate representation of the
parties, is not the same as one in which the sectional interests of a
society remain but are balanced by constitutional restraints. At Rome,
there were many such restraints. Magistrates were elected to colleges
in which each magistrate possessed a veto (the right of “intercession”)
over his colleagues of equal rank, and tribunes, the people’s
magistrates, could exercise an intercessio to defend the people’s
interests against the actions of any other magistrates; and there were
other checks and balances designed to prevent abuse, and to avert the
danger of monarchy arising from the power and prestige of any
individual. Polybius was unduly optimistic about the restraining
effects of this system. As the future would show, the restraints were
potentially negative in effect, producing not collaborative action but
stalemate, and violence when the obstructions became impossible for
one party or another to tolerate.
What most threatens Polybius’ judgment, is that the Roman political
system was driven not so much by compromise as by competition; by
family pride and claims of ancestry, one’s standing among clients and
dependants, summed up in the word “dignity” – dignitas, or “what
one is worth,” a concept covering much more than the modern idea of
personal deportment, rather one’s entire social, political and
individual standing. The aspiring senator needs to win the consulship,
the highest magistracy, to maintain the status of his family – or, in
the case of a “new man” from a non‐senatorial background, to
establish it – as part of the nobilitas. It does not matter so much what
a man does in office, so long as he can avoid prosecution for
maladministration, and if this occurred he can expect his senatorial
peers to rally round in his defence, in case some day they too were
impeached and needed his support. It is a dangerous mixture of
ingredients, especially with the acquisition of overseas possessions
and the influx of foreign wealth. It was the habit of those contending
for high office to incur debt to win election, and its corollary, the need
to recoup one’s electoral expenses, generated mismanagement and
corruption. Meanwhile, the price of competition rose, with immense
wealth pouring into Rome from its newly acquired overseas
territories.
Polybius’ interpretation is a classic example of a theory succumbing to
the force of events. Within ten years of his writing, and still within his
own lifetime, his image of a stable Roman society saved from
revolution by its institutions, was shattered. There are several issues
which his balanced constitution failed to contain; the agrarian
problem in Italy; the Roman citizenship; the question of the
provinces; and war, the army and the nature of power. I will take
them in turn and as briefly as possible; it will be obvious that they
interlock at many points. The idea is not to explore these issues in
their own right, but to show how in their various ways they exposed
the institutional weaknesses of the Roman res publica and invited the
creation of a remedy.
We need first to recall what has been happening during the century
before Polybius’ mature lifetime; sustained war, with all its
consequences for manpower and economic growth, against Carthage,
Macedon, and in Spain, where Rome was engaged after the Punic
Wars until the fall of Numantia in 133 bce. To judge by the recorded
census figures, manpower losses in the second Punic war of 218–201
were substantial, with a decline from 214 000 Roman citizens in 203
to 144 000 ten years later (or, on a different basis of estimation, from
240 000 to 183 000), repeating an equally distinctive pattern of loss
at the time of the first Punic War of 264–241. In both cases the
figures reflect both casualties in war and the ensuing decline in the
reproductive capacity of society. We must add the economic losses
entailed in long absences of citizens from their lands, as they were
summoned to serve in the wars. The consequences of these factors
were neglect, foreclosures and bankruptcies, abandoned farms and
their seizure by more powerful neighbors and creditors. There were
settlements of discharged soldiers on confiscated public land such as
that taken from Capua in retribution for its support of Hannibal, but
much of this was usurped by powerful families, who turned it over, or
let it lapse, from agriculture to unsupervised pasturage. This caused
further insecurity, shepherds being next to bandits as they herd flocks
between hill and plain and find shelter and support where they can.
Another disruptive factor was the growth of slavery from the wars.
Many of the captives were put to work as agricultural slaves in
appalling living conditions, creating the threat of slave wars, such as
broke out in Sicily in 136–131, and sixty years later in Italy.
The challenges to the social order inherent in these conditions led to
the reform attempts of the brothers, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus.
From a family of the high nobility, connected through their mother
with the Scipios, the Gracchi are a paradigm of the link that, whether
through enlightenment or desperation, one may find between
aristocratic background and reforming tendencies. Tiberius Gracchus
served under Scipio Aemilianus at Carthage in 146 bce (it is
interesting to think that he was there with Polybius) and at Numantia
in 137. A story is told that he had observed the results of depopulation
while travelling to Spain to serve there, presumably by a route
through northern Italy; in any case, the problems were not confined
to the south.
Elected tribune of the people as a young senator in 133, Ti. Gracchus
introduced forward legislation on land reform, beginning with the
recovery of public land. This was to be achieved by a combination of
expulsions when illegal occupation could be demonstrated and buying
out when it could not. A land commission was appointed to supervise
the work, to be funded from the estate of the recently deceased king
Attalus III of Pergamum, a connection that goes back to Rome’s
friendship with his grandfather Attalus I at the time of Macedonian
Wars. When Attalus III died in 133, having no heirs of the line he
bequeathed his kingdom to Rome. This legally challenging situation
(under whose law was the bequest made?) would not mean that Rome
gained unrestrained possession of all his property, but that she
accepted the inheritance with whatever obligations might be attached
to it, such as the payment of debts and bequests to individual
legatees. If Attalus had named as his heirs the Roman senate and
people (and whom else could he name?), this immediately thrust the
question of the ownership and use of the proceeds into the heart of
the conflict that was now developing, against Polybius’ predictions,
between senate and people. Which was the sovereign body?
When an alternative proposal was put forward, to spend the bequest
on public distributions that would increase the popularity of the
senators who voted it, Tiberius Gracchus challenged the claims of the
senate to authority and took his proposals straight to the popular
assembly known as the “concilium plebis.” This was a politically
charged move, but legitimate, and rooted in the distant past. The
concilium plebis was not a feature of the original Republican
constitution, but had come into being shortly afterwards, in the
rebellion against that constitution known as the “Secession of the
People,” conventionally dated to 494 bce. The people had withdrawn
from Rome to the Aventine Hill, which at that time lay outside the
city, and had established its own assembly and its own magistrates,
the tribunes, who quickly acquired diverse rights as the people’s
champions. Long denied legal force, the resolutions of the assembly
known as “decisions of the plebs” or plebiscites (plebiscita) had, more
than a century before the time of the Gracchi, acquired the same legal
authority as those of the tribal assembly of the original constitution.
In the concilium plebis Gracchus the tribune was on home territory,
but the senate took him on by planting another tribune to veto the
legislation. The people responded by deposing the hostile tribune
from office, probably the first action in this sequence of events that
was definitely illegal, though one can make the case for it. Gracchus
then stood for a second tribunate, which if not illegal was certainly
irregular, but before holding it was killed by a senatorial posse led by,
of all people, the pontifex maximus. Not only was this action illegal by
any measure; it was a violation of the religious protection
(sacrosancitas) attaching to the figure of a tribune. Gracchus’ killers
had committed an act of sacrilege. They had also defined the issue as
one of senate against people, and set a pattern of violence to be
repeated in the years that followed.
The issue of the Roman citizenship came to a head under Tiberius’
younger brother C. Gracchus, who was elected tribune in 123/2 bce
and again in 122/1, and brought in a major program of legislation.
From the beginning, the Romans had been far more generous than
the Greeks in extending the citizenship to those whom they
conquered. Not that this was entirely based on idealism, for it was on
their inclusive policies that an expanding Rome had built its
manpower resources, as the communities that received the
citizenship also acquired military obligations and shared in the
benefits of the further wars they made possible. Over the years,
however, this policy too had begun to be a cause of dissension
between popular and aristocratic institutions, and between Rome and
the allies. The citizenship brought political and legal benefits,
including rights of intermarriage and the vote, and protections
against exploitation. However, new voters disturbed the status quo,
reduced the influence of the original citizen population, and their
voting behavior might tend to favor the Roman magistrates who had
won them the citizenship – which also attracted immigrants to an
increasingly over‐crowded city.
At the same time, Roman policies towards their Italian allies were
becoming more restrictive. Aspiring citizens who were excluded
resented it, while at the same time some of those who had been
admitted felt exploited, with all those wars to fight, ever further from
their homes. Gaius Gracchus revived a proposal to extend the
citizenship to all Italians, and proposed founding colonies at
Carthage, Capua, and Tarentum. However, the citizenship bill was
defeated as existing citizens defended their rights, and the colony at
Carthage was abandoned on religious grounds. After their destruction
of the city, the Romans had sworn never to allow the site to be
repopulated, and had spread salt on its fields to make them
uncultivable. The effects of the salt would wear off as it leached away,
but the oath remained a formidable obstacle to resettlement. Gaius
Gracchus also introduced a Grain Law (Lex Frumentaria) to secure
state‐purchased grain, to be made available at a rate subsidized below
the market price, but this too was a divisive issue, for it was only
citizens fully resident at Rome who enjoyed the entitlement.
Like his brother, Gaius Gracchus died in a counter‐revolution. The
senate had passed what it styled the “the ultimate decree” (senatus
consultum ultimum) “to protect the state from danger,” a procedure
with no legal authority except the senate’s self‐appointed role as the
guardian of the constitution. Italian resentment at the withholding of
the citizenship led to the “Social” (in the sense of “Allied”) Wars of
91–83, which were brought to an end by the granting of it. Even then,
the senate engaged in gerrymandering to exclude the new citizens
from their legitimate rights.
An ever‐present factor in these events was the growth of the city of
Rome itself as an urban community, as a rapidly enlarging population
challenged a divided government’s ability to maintain order and
tranquillity. With a population perhaps already rising towards a
million, the city was behind its times in looking after their needs; in
such matters, cities like Alexandria and Antioch were far in advance.
Without any substantial improvements to its physical amenities, the
safety and living conditions of the city were constantly exposed to the
dangers of fire, floods from the Tiber, polluted water and pestilence,
afflictions reported only sporadically in our historical sources but a
constant cause of misery. The last of them, pestilence, is powerfully
illustrated by the mass grave that came to light in 1876 at the huge
cemetery on the Esquiline just outside the Servian walls, when the
foundations of a new construction fell into the void left by the
decomposed bodies. It was measured as 160 ft. long by 100 ft. wide
and 30 ft. deep, and estimated by its excavator, Rodolfo Lanciani, to
have contained the astonishing number of 24 000 corpses – the
result, in Lanciani’s opinion, of a single epidemic, totally
undocumented in our written sources. As to normal practice, the
bodies of slaves and the very poor were disposed of by burning or
dumping, or thrown with other refuse into the unmarked pits, again
outside the Esquiline Gate, known to Varro and the grammarian
Festus as puticuli, many of which have been found and their typical
measurements established; with surface dimensions of 5 x 4 meters
and a depth of 10 meters, these are seriously disturbing monuments
of the funerary history of Rome and, by extension, of living conditions
in the Republican city. No wonder that the poet Horace, supported by
his ancient commentators, could write of the area as strewn with the
bones of the dead, where witches might gather to summon up their
spirits (Satires 1.8.8–13). That was before the area was acquired by
Augustus’ supporter Maecenas and converted into pleasure gardens,
which gives Horace the opportunity to cite its overall dimensions as
1000 x 300 feet – poetically imprecise no doubt, but giving us a sense
of the scale of it.
As to the provinces, there are three overriding questions, first the
rudimentary system of government Rome applied to them. Senatorial
governors, known as “praetors,” were sometimes appointed and
magistracies occasionally prolonged to permit continuity of
government, but there was no system of what were later known as
“pro‐consular” positions, that is to say regular appointments held in
provinces “in place of the consul.” Rome was improvising a system of
government, without wanting to disrupt the established systems of
promotion to the Roman magistracies, or to change the nature of the
magistracies, which remained rigorously annual.
The provinces were acquired piecemeal, and without an overall plan.
Macedonia was acquired after the Macedonian Wars with which this
chapter began, while Asia Minor fell to Rome by the will of Attalus III
of Pergamum. Narbonensis, the original “provincia” that still gives its
name to Provence, was established in 121 bce, in a moment of
opportunism that Polybius would have admired; it combined a
campaign against Gallic tribes, undertaken in concert with Massilia
(Marseilles), Rome’s oldest ally in the west, with the securing of the
land route to Spain. The colony that gave its name to the province,
Narbo (modern Narbonne), was founded in 118.
Newly acquired territories were taxed – but under what legal
definition is not clear. Was it tribute, in the form of indemnity
payments or reparations after war, as might be said of Carthage in
202? or was it (an extraordinary theory advanced by Cicero) rent paid
by provincials for the continued occupation of land now owned by
Rome? If there was reciprocity of benefits given for taxes paid, it was
not made explicit. In the Athenian empires of the fifth and fourth
centuries, a supposition was maintained that the tribute (styled
phoros in the first empire, eisphora in the second) was for services
rendered in commerce and common defence, but no such rationale
was offered by Rome, unless it was the provincials’ betterment
through involvement in Rome’s expansion.
The tribute was exacted by contractors (publicani) who bid for the
right to collect the taxes and recouped their expenditure as they did
so. The result was that the res publica got its money at the start of the
process with no further incentive to intervene, while the publicani,
effectively unsupervised, could look for their profits by the end of it.
This was a royal road to extortion, restrained only by a legal process
that was difficult to access since it had to be pursued at Rome, where
the contractors and their friends, including predatory senators, could
gang up and obstruct the legal process. At the formal levels of
government, too, there was notorious corruption, extortion, and
abuse, not to mention the ransacking of provinces for anything of
value. Cicero, as governor of Cilicia, made it a point of pride that he
had not confiscated works of art for his own enjoyment. He had made
his own reputation as an orator by prosecuting the proconsul C.
Verres for maladministration in Sicily. Verres was patently guilty, but
there was a precedent for the theft and importation of provincial
treasures in L. Mummius’ ransacking of Corinth in 146 bce.
The destruction of Corinth and Carthage and the siege of Numantia
were followed by a generation of relative peace, but in the last decades
of the century the limits of Roman power were tested by successive
wars; the Jugurthine War in Africa (111–106), arising from the
disputed inheritance of a Moorish prince, and, in a new phase of
migration of northern peoples, Teutonic and Celtic invasions of Italy
(107–101). The wars were prolonged, and they required new forms of
recruitment and structures of command. The response to these needs
created a new estate in Roman society and new players in Roman
politics: the army and its generals.
By the late second century bce the effectiveness of the traditional
citizen army had reached its limit. As we have just seen, the burden of
service fell heavily upon the contributing Italians, not only through
losses of manpower in warfare and by attrition, but through the
damage to the agricultural economy caused by absence and neglect.
There was also growing resentment among the allies, as Rome began
to deny them citizenship and its benefits began to seem more
dubious. Polybius’ claim that they fought willingly against Hannibal
would not have been as true a century later. There were also the
strategic limitations of a citizen army, as serving soldiers were
released for the harvest. As in the wars described by Thucydides,
campaigning was limited by the agricultural seasons, with obvious
difficulties for the more continuous military operations that might be
necessary in overseas theatres of war.
The Romans also lacked a structure of command adapted for the
demands of prolonged campaigning. The powers of magistracies were
confined to the year in which they were held, but the consequence of
this, frequent changes of command as magistrate succeeded
magistrate, was to deprive campaigns of continuity and the benefits of
experience. It was necessary for C. Marius, the Roman commander in
the Jugurthine and the Teutonic wars, to hold five successive
consulships in order to build up a strategic advantage. This was not
the best way to secure continuity of command, nor was it what was
intended for the consulship.
Marius followed his victories in Africa by the wars against the Cimbri
and Teutones in north Italy and southern Gaul. The essence of the
reform by which he achieved his successes was in the recruiting of a
fully professional, paid army, replacing the citizen army based on the
ancient property classes defined in the constitutional settlements of
the sixth century. Marius extended the opportunity of service to any
person who offered himself, on the strict basis of his fitness as a
soldier. Such men, styled “capite censi,” because they had no property
but only their person (“caput”) to declare, had previously been
enrolled in crises such as the Hannibalic War, but were now made the
basis of a full‐time professional army, serving winter and summer
alike. Despite the absence of a property requirement, however, it was
still necessary to be a citizen to be accepted for service, for which the
regular term either was or soon became 15 years. The stipend was
enhanced by incentives in the form of booty; success was rewarded by
bonuses. The soldiers were equipped for practical use, carrying not
only standard weapons (shield, sword, pike), but also a shovel for
digging in fortifications, essential for defence and consolidating the
results of a campaign. The descendants of “Marius’ mules” appear on
the reliefs of Trajan’s Column at Rome, where soldiers are seen
digging in fortifications and building camps as well as killing the
enemy and standing in parade (Figure 1.1).
With these and other reforms, soldiering became a viable full‐time
career, offering a steady income and the chance of a stable retirement.
One price to pay was deracination, as soldiers were required to serve
in many regions and might be settled in military colonies far from
their land of origin. Family life is a regular victim of a professional
army, in which men are removed from the home country and are
often away from base. On the other hand, a young man recruited at
eighteen, who handled himself well and survived military action
might find himself settled as a small farmer at well under forty, after a
career whose usefulness none would doubt. It was enough to attract
many to the service. For all the nostalgia of conservative
commentators, there is no doubt that the new one was better trained
and more effective in meeting the military needs of the time.
Figure 1.1 Roman soldiers as builders and laborers: distant
descendants of “Marius’ mules” taken from Trajan’s column of the
early second century.
Source: Conrad Cichorius Die Reliefs der Traianssäule (Verlag Georg Reimer, Berlin
1896), Tafel XLII. Wikimedia Commons, Category:Trajan’s Column – Cichorius Plates.

Marius’ military reform was not in itself a political act, but it had
immense political consequences. The “new model army” emerges as a
political force, a new estate in the realm. Without anticipating too
much, we can see how this came about, as the new recruits, without
any census qualification or interest in property and the land, are not
beholden to the social order, and have no incentive to uphold it. They
profit from their commanders’ success in war and depend on their
ability to deliver their promises through political influence. But the
generals were not always able to do this, even with the authority of
success in the field; their proposals fell foul of hostile rivals and a
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
lofty science.[1] It appears, therefore, that, though the Celts had
passed originally from Gaul into Britain, yet Britain had become and
remained the sanctuary of their common religion. Note that nothing
of the sort was to be found elsewhere. Here we have characteristics
of ancient Britain and ancient Gaul and of them alone. Now observe
that though this Celtic colour is to be later on—in fact much later—
modified by waters from other sources, yet it will never completely
disappear. The Celtic element remains visible to our day in our two
nations: you have your green Celtic fringe in Cornwall, Wales, part of
Scotland, and the greater part of Ireland;—we have something of the
kind in Brittany.

III.
During the first century b.c. a very big event took place which was
to stamp the whole of our ulterior history on this side of the Channel
with its principal character: I am referring to the Romanisation of
Gaul.
For many reasons which I omit, the advent of the Romans, though
of course it met with some strenuous and even splendid resistance
for a short time, could hardly be called a conquest in the odious
meaning of the word. Now, you know that Caesar in the very midst of
his campaigns in Gaul found time to carry out two bold expeditions
into Britain. It is very interesting to note his motives. He was not, as
one could easily imagine, impelled by an appetite of conquest. This
appetite, by the way, was much less among the Romans than is
generally imagined, and Caesar himself had enough to do at that
time with the turbulent Gallic tribes without entering, if it could be
avoided, upon a doubtful enterprise beyond the Channel. But he
could not do otherwise, and he gives us himself his motives, which
are extremely interesting from the point of view of the history of our
early relations. He felt that he could not see an end to his Gallic war
if he did not at least intimidate the British brothers of the Gauls
always ready to send them help! Let me quote his own words
(remember that he speaks of himself in the third person):
 ‘Though not much was left of the fine season—and winter
comes early in those parts—he resolved to pass into Britain,
at least, to begin with, for a reconnoitring raid, because he
saw well that in almost all their wars (the Romans’ wars) with
the Gauls, help came from that country to their enemies.’[2]

His two bold raids into Britain had some of the desired effect. His
successors achieved more, leisurely, without too much trouble, but
very incompletely too, both as regards extent of territory and depth of
impression. You see how I have expressed all this in my draught.
In Gaul, on the contrary, the transformation was complete and
lasting, lasting to our days. The civilisation of Rome, which had
already fascinated Gaul from afar, was so eagerly and so
unanimously adopted all over the country that, in the space of a few
decades, this country was nearly as Roman as Rome. The fame of
the Gallo-Roman schools, the great number of Latin writers and
orators of Gallic origin, the numberless remains of theatres, temples,
bridges, aqueducts—some in marvellous state of preservation—
which are even now to be found in hundreds of places, not only in
the south but even in the north of this country, from the
Mediterranean to the Rhine, and still more than anything else our
language, so purely Romanic, abundantly testify to the willingness,
nay to the enthusiasm, with which Gaul made her own the civilisation
of Rome.
But why do I insist on this fact? Because much of all this we were
to transmit to you later on, chiefly on the Norman vehicle. The direct
impression of Rome on your country was to remain superficial—
though it would be a mistake to overlook it altogether—but the
indirect influence through us was nearly to balance any other
influence and to become one of the chief factors of your moral and
intellectual history.

IV.
 But before we reach that time we have to take note of two nearly
simultaneous events. In the fifth century the Franks established
themselves in Roman Gaul and the Angles and Saxons in Roman
Britain. You see in my draught each of these rivers—English and
Frankish—flowing respectively into the streams of British and Gallic
history. I have given about the same bluish colour to these new
rivers to point out that Anglo-Saxons and Franks were originally
cousins and neighbours. Their establishment was more or less
attended with some rough handling, but even in their case, and
chiefly in our case, the strict propriety of the word conquest to
describe their coming can be questioned. There had been previous
and partial agreements with the old people to come over, besides
they were few in numbers. Yet the results were strikingly different.
On our side the Franks were gradually absorbed, though giving their
name to the country—France—and constituting, specially in the
north, a small aristocracy of soldiers. On your side, on the contrary,
the Anglo-Saxons converted the old country into a new one. Instead
of giving up their own language they imposed it, at least to a large
extent. Between them and their Frankish cousins established in old
Roman Gaul relations remained quite cordial. A king of Kent, who
had married a Christian daughter of a king of Paris, showed
remarkable good will for the second introduction of Christianity into
Britain. He and his Anglo-Saxon comrades would not accept
Christianity from the ancient Britons who had already become
Christian, more or less, under the Romans, but they accepted it
eagerly at the recommendation of the Romanised and Christianised
Franks. May I say that the Franks went so far as to provide the
Mission under Augustine with the necessary interpreters! Very soon
the Anglo-Saxons became so eager themselves for Christianity that
they became foremost in the spreading of it to the last country which
remained to be converted to the new faith, I mean Germany. This is
a very interesting story, though an old one, and, I am afraid, much
forgotten: your Winfrid—he and his pupils—with the recommendation
and support of Charles Martel—the founder of our Carolingian
dynasty—Christianising Germany, founding there a dozen
bishoprics, with British bishops, becoming himself the first
archbishop of Mayence, and then dying a martyr on German soil....
Is not it interesting, this now forgotten story, in which we see early
England and early France friendly co-operating to Christianise and to
civilise Germany?

V.
The next stage in the history of both countries was again
analogous. About the same time—the ninth century—we, and you,
had troubles from the same people: the Northmen. They were few in
numbers, but gave much annoyance for some time. The result was
the same on both sides: you practically turned your Northmen into
Anglo-Saxons, and we turned ours into Romanised Frenchmen of
the best sort. The process was much more rapidly completed on our
side than on yours, and you were still engaged in it when our
Romanised Normans arrived in Britain and nearly succeeded in
achieving what the Romans themselves had failed to achieve. And
more than that—more from the point of view of our relations—they
very nearly succeeded in building out of our two countries a
practically unified but short-lived empire.
In 1180 the whole of the present United Kingdom of Great Britain
and Ireland and nearly two-thirds of France were practically
acknowledging, under one title or another, only one sovereign: Henry
II. Plantagenet. Let me say—though I own it is not the view which is
generally prevalent in our schools, and far from it!—that it is a pity
they did not succeed altogether! Henry II. had against him untoward
circumstances and, above all, Philip Augustus! He had finally to give
up that fine dream. Now, union failing to be achieved that way, it is a
pity, I think, that it failed also the other way, a little time after in 1216.
Then the far greater part of your people, barons and clergy, revolting
against one of the unworthiest rulers ever known, King John, agreed
to invite over the eldest son, and heir, of the French king to be their
own king. He came over, of course, was received at Westminster,
accepted and confirmed Magna Charta, the charter of your liberties,
and was going to be acknowledged in all parts of the kingdom when
John—allow me these strong terms—did the stupidest and
wickedest thing of his stupid and wicked life by dying at the wrong
time! at that time! He died when by living a little longer he might have
been the occasion of joining our two countries into one empire!
Fancy for a moment what this would have meant, the course our
common history would have taken for our common glory and the
future of the whole human race! But, dying, he left an heir, a boy of
nine years of age, and the idea of innocent legitimacy, with the
strenuous support of the Papal legate, prevailed over the half-
accomplished fact! And thus this splendid chance was lost!
Another occasion presented itself hardly more than a century
afterwards, when the Capetian line of our own kings became extinct
and the nearest heir was the English king Edward III. In fact, he was
as much French as English, and the king of a country whose official
language was still French and whose popular language was now
permeated with French. I think it was no more difficult for France, in
1328, to accept this king, and be united with England under the
same sovereign while remaining herself, than for England in 1603 to
accept a king from Scotland. Well, there was some hesitation among
the French barons and clergy, and a solemn discussion was held on
the point of law. In fact, there was no law at all on the subject and
they had a free choice. To my mind the interest of the country
pointed to the recognition of Edward, that is to union. No doubt, on
the other hand, that it was the way pointed to by civil and by canon
laws. They preferred the other course. No doubt they meant well, but
to be well-meaning and far-seeing are two things, and I for one, in
the teeth of all adverse and orthodox teaching, lament the decision
which they took and the turn which they gave to national feelings yet
in their infancy. The other decision would have spared the two
countries not only one, but several hundred years’ wars, and would
have secured to the two sister countries all the mutual advantages of
peaceful development and cordial co-operation.
I can only briefly refer to the famous Treaty of Troyes, 1420, by
which in the course of the Hundred Years’ War our King—insane
literally speaking—and his German wife, disinherited their son to the
profit of their son-in-law, the English king, and handed over to him, at
once, as Regent, the crown of France. This treaty of course, under
such circumstances, and when national feelings had been roused—
however unfortunately—in the contrary direction, had little moral and
political value. Yet, had your Henry V. lived—he died two years after
the treaty—he might possibly have got it accepted by France.
Professor A. Coville in his contribution to what is presently the latest,
the leading, history of France, commenting on Henry’s love of justice
and the stern discipline he maintained in his army—the Army of
Agincourt—concludes in the following remarkable terms, which I beg
to translate:

‘After so many years of strife the people of this Kingdom

[the French Kingdom] looked up to his stern government to
turn this anarchy into order. Paris accepted as a deliverance
this yoke, heavy no doubt but protective.’[3]

It is interesting to observe that this view of this French historian is

in complete agreement with Shakespeare’s ‘Henry V.’ Such an
agreement between an English poet and a French scientist is
certainly worthy of attention!
Well, Henry V. died, and national feelings being decidedly roused,
flaming into the stupendous miracle of Joan of Arc, decided
otherwise.

VI.
What about this otherwise, I mean this definitive political
separation and these centuries of hostility which fill our history text-
books? We can speak of it without the slightest uneasiness, not only
because all this seems now to be so far in the past, a past which can
never revive, but, above all, because of the remarkable characters of
this hostility and of its brilliant interludes.
I say that this hostility had, on the whole, this remarkable
character, to be lofty rivalry, not low hatred. It may have been—it was
indeed at times—fierce and passionate, but it was all along
accompanied by mutual respect. Our two countries aimed at
surpassing much more than at destroying each other. It was more
like a world race for glory than a grip for death. Its spirit was
quarrelsome animosity taking immense delight in stupid pinpricks
and daring strokes, not cold hate dreaming of mortal stabs to the
heart.
Your great poet Rudyard Kipling has expressed this very finely in
the poem he wrote three years ago on the occasion, if I remember
well, of your King’s first visit to Paris. Let me quote from this poem:

‘We stormed the seas tack for tack and burst

Through the doorways of new worlds, doubtful which was
first.’

‘Ask the wave that has not watched war between us two ...
Each the other’s mystery, terror, need, and love.’

‘O companion, we have lived greatly through all time.’

I could illustrate this spirit by many stories. One of the most typical
is about the encounter on the battlefield of Fontenoy, in 1745, of the
massive English column and of the French centre. There is in that
story a mixture of fine legend and historical truth, but anyway it is
illustrative of the spirit. The very fact that the legend could grow out
of the truth is a proof of the spirit by itself.
There is another story much less known, but which is as much
illuminating. It was at the beginning of the American war, thirty-four
years after Fontenoy, in 1779. Your famous seaman Rodney was in
Paris, which he could not leave on account of certain debts, yet he
was perfectly free to walk about as any ordinary private man, though
France and England were at war. Concentration camps had not been
invented as yet! One day, then, as he was dining with some French
military friends—always remember, please, that we were at war—
they came to talk of some recent successes we had just had at sea,
among them the conquest of Grenada in the West Indies. Rodney
expressed himself on these successes with polite disdain, saying
that if he was free—he Rodney—the French would not have it so
easy! Upon which old Marshal de Biron paid for his debts and said:
‘You are free, sir, the French will not avail themselves of the
obstacles which prevent you from fighting them.’ Well, it cost us very
dear to have let him go, but was not it fine!
I am glad to hear from my friend, your Oxford countryman, Mr.
C.R.L. Fletcher, the author of a brilliantly written ‘Introductory History
of England’ in four volumes, that the story is told in substantially the
same terms on your side, by all the authorities on the subject:
Mundy’s ‘Life and Correspondence of Lord Rodney’ (vol. i. p. 180);
Laughton in the ‘Dictionary of National Biography’; Captain Mahan in
his ‘Influence of Sea Power in History,’ p. 377.
We could tell many, many stories of that kind, but let these two be
sufficient for our purpose to-day. And yet, even with all these
extenuating circumstances, how pitiful it would have been if this
enmity had been continuous! But it was not, and even far from it!
Even the worst of all our wars, the Hundred Years’ War, was
interrupted by very numerous and very long truces lasting years and
even decades of years! In fact, that war consisted generally of mere
raids with handfuls of men, though it must be said that they often did
harm out of all proportion to their numbers. As to the other wars in
more modern times they were pleasantly intermingled with interludes
of co-operation and alliance. The simple enumeration of them is
instructive and may even appear surprising.
In the sixteenth century there was a temporary alliance between
your Henry VIII. and our Francis the First, against the Emperor of
Germany, Charles V. In fact Henry VIII., at first, had allied himself
with the German Emperor against the French king, but when the
latter, attacked from all cardinal points (Spain and most of Italy were
then in the hands of the Emperor), had been beaten at Pavia and
taken prisoner to Madrid, your King perceived his mistake, i.e.
England’s ultimate danger. He consequently offered his alliance to
Francis for the restoration of this balance of power, which, for want of
something better, was the guarantee of the independence of all
states. In Mignet’s study[4] of these times I find this extract from your
King’s instructions to his ambassadors in France, in March 1526, as
to the conditions forced upon the French king, in his Spanish prison,
by the Emperor of Germany:
 ‘They [the English ambassadors] shall infer what damage
the crown of France may and is likely to stand in by the said
conditions—this be the way to bring him [Charles] to the
monarchy of Christendom.’

You know that, after all, the world-wide ambition of the then
Emperor of Germany was defeated, to the point that he resigned in
despair and ended his life in a monastery.
Again, towards the end of the same century Queen Elizabeth was
on quite friendly terms with our Henry the Fourth. They had the same
enemy: Philip the Second of Spain, son of Charles the Fifth and heir
to the greater part of his dominions. This friendship ripened into
alliance, and there was a very strong English contingent in the
French army which retook Amiens, from the Spaniards, in 1597.
Both sovereigns united also in helping the Low Countries in their
struggle for independence against Spain.
In the seventeenth century your Cromwell and our Mazarin
renewed the same alliance against Spain, and in 1657 a Franco-
British army under the ablest of the French soldiers of that time,
Marshal Turenne, beat the Spaniards near Dunkirk and took Dunkirk
itself, which was handed over to you as the price previously agreed
upon of the alliance.
After the Restoration your Stuarts were on so friendly terms with
the French Government that they were accused, sometimes with
some show of justice, of forgetting the national interests. There is no
doubt that they tried, and to a certain extent successfully, to evade
the just demands and control of your Parliament by becoming
pensioners of the King of France. Their selling Dunkirk to France in
1662, five years after its capture from Spain, made them particularly
unpopular. Of course, when they were finally expelled by your
revolutions of 1688, they found, with hundreds of followers, a
hospitable reception at the French court, causing thereby on the
other hand a revival of hostility between our government and your
new one. May I observe, by the way, that the head of this new
government of yours was the Prince of Orange—French Orange,
near Avignon—and that this little, practically self-governing
principality was suffered to remain his until his death, in 1702, when
Louis XIV. annexed it to France?
In the eighteenth century itself, marked by so keen a rivalry, there
were temporary periods of understanding, specially during the two or
three decades following the peace of Utrecht, with a view of
preserving the peace of Europe. The names of Sir Robert Walpole
and Cardinal Fleury are attached to this period.
In the nineteenth century, from the fall of Napoleon, the
improvement of our relations—down to the present day—has been
nearly continuous and marked by a series of remarkable facts. It was
first the union of our navies, with that of Russia, for the destruction of
the Turkish fleet at Navarino, in 1827, thereby securing the
independence of Greece—an independence which was completed in
the ensuing years by French and Russian armies—(we wish the
present Greek Government, the Royal government, remembered this
better!). It was then the union of our policies for the liberation of
Belgium from Dutch vassalage, a liberation which Prussia wanted to
oppose but durst not, seeing that France and England had made up
their minds about it. Then came the union of our armies for the
mistaken object of protecting Turkey against Russia (how strange it
sounds now!), or of opening China to the European trade. Chief of
all, how could we forget that—some way or other—France and
Britain have been godmothers to Italian unity!
Well, all this is rather a long record and it may appear surprising to
many as an aggregate, though nearly each component part of it is
well known! The reason for this impression of surprise is this: in spite
of this political co-operation, and side by side with it, much of the
acrimonious spirit long survived, unwilling to die. The twentieth
century, thank God! and the present alliance have given it the ‘coup
de grâce’!

VII.
 I have adverted until now to the political side only of our relations,
but if we look at our past relations from another standpoint—the
standpoint of the mind, of moral progress, of civilisation—we have a
somewhat simpler story to tell, yet a chequered story too. Whatever
our political relations may have been—with perhaps the only
exception of the time when you opposed all reforms, because we
were making revolutionary, disconcerting reforms!—we have been
generally emulating for all that ennobles the life of man: higher
thought, justice, and liberty. There is here such a formidable
accumulation of interesting facts that I can scarcely refer to them
except in very general terms, lest I should lose sight of the limits
within which I must compress this article.
French and English writers rarely took much account of the
political hostility which prevailed between the two countries. Your
writers have generally paid, from Chaucer’s time down to our own,
the closest attention to our literature, whether they have followed its
lead or reacted against its influence. On the other hand, all our
political philosophers have always found in the study of your
institutions a source of inexhaustible interest, whether they have
been admirers of them like Montesquieu or sharp critics like
Rousseau. And let no one imagine that this side of the question is
devoid of practical interest. It is owing to this continuous interchange
of ideas that both countries have been equipped for these
intellectual, moral and political achievements by which, in spite of all
their shortcomings, they have won the glory of being generally
acknowledged, on so many points, as the joint leaders of modern
civilisation. It is the fact that they have been more or less conscious
all along, or nearly so, of this joint leadership, which has so happily
counteracted and at the end got the better of political acrimony and
popular prejudices. The Entente Cordiale between our two countries
is largely a triumph of the mind, the finest in history and certainly the
most far-reaching. Let us not underestimate therefore the influence
of intellectual workers. It has been the glory of most of them in this
country and in yours to plead for the noblest ideals: for liberty and
justice at home, and also, abroad, for a cordial understanding of all
nations, for harmony between national interests and the rights of
humanity. In modern Germany, on the contrary, most of those who
are supposed to be the representatives of the mind have not been
ashamed of ministering, long before this war, to the brutal appetites
of a feudal and military caste by spreading among their own people a
monstrous belief in the divine right of the German race to oppress all
the world. The best of them, with extremely rare exceptions, have
done nothing to oppose this dangerous fanaticism and to maintain
the nobler traditions of German thought. Both instances therefore,
ours and theirs—I mean French and British intellectual history on
one side, German later intellectual history on the other side—
sufficiently illustrate the power of spiritual factors for good or for evil.
The only thing to be deplored in our case is that our Entente was so
long deferred. Things would have turned otherwise if our Entente
had ripened somewhat earlier into a closer association, gradually
extending by a moral attraction to all peace-loving nations. Had it
been so who would have dared to attack them? At least let the bitter
lesson be turned to account for the future!
And chief of all let us think of the new chapter of our common
history. There is being written on the banks and hills of the Somme
such a chapter of our common history as will live eternally in the
souls of Britons and Frenchmen. Let the memory of it, added to all
those I have recounted, bind together in eternal alliance the hearts
and the wills of the two nations. Let it be known to all the world that
this present alliance is not like so many of the past a temporary
combination of governments, but the unanimous and for ever fixed
will of both nations as the crowning and logical conclusion of their
glorious history. Let this close and intimate association include all our
noble allies, and all such nations as may be worthy to join it; let it
become the Grand Alliance, the only one really and completely
deserving of this name, to which it will have been reserved to
establish, at last, the reign of Right and Peace on earth.
Gaston E. Broche.

FOOTNOTES
[1] Caesar, B.G. vi. 13.
 [2] Caesar, B.G. iv. 20.
[3] See Histoire de France publiée sous la direction de Mr.
Lavisse: Tome IV. par A. Coville, Recteur de l’Académie de
Clermont-Ferrand, Professeur honoraire de l’Université de Lyon.
[4] Mignet, Rivalité de François 1er et de Charles-Quint, II ch.
ix.
 OLD WAYS AT WESTMINSTER.
recalled by sir henry lucy.
To the July number of Cornhill I last year contributed an article
gleaned from the Recollections of an anonymous observer of the
House of Commons from the year 1830 to the close of the session of
1835. It contained a series of thumb-nail personal sketches of
eminent members long since gone to ‘another place,’ leaving names
that will live in English history. A portion of the musty volume was
devoted to descriptions of Parliamentary surroundings and
procedure interesting by comparison with those established at the
present day.
‘Q,’ as for brevity I name the unknown recorder, describes the old
House of Commons destroyed by fire in 1834 as dark, gloomy and
badly ventilated, so small that not more than 400 out of the 658
members could be accommodated with any measure of comfort. In
those days an important debate was not unfrequently preceded by ‘a
call of the House,’ which brought together a full muster. On such
occasions members were, ‘Q’ says, ‘literally crammed together,’ the
heat of the House recalling accounts of the then recent tragedy of
the Black Hole of Calcutta. Immediately over the entrance provided
for members was the Strangers’ Gallery; underneath it were several
rows of seats for friends of members. This arrangement exists in the
new House. Admission to the Strangers’ Gallery was obtained on
presentation of a note or order from a member. Failing that, the
payment of half a crown to the doorkeeper at once procured
admittance.
When the General Election of 1880 brought the Liberals into
power, parties in the House of Commons, in obedience to
immemorial custom, crossed over, changing sides. The Irish
members, habitually associated with British Liberals, having when in
Opposition shared with them the benches to the left of the Speaker,
on this occasion declined to change their quarters, a decision ever
since observed. They were, they said, free from allegiance to either
political party and would remain uninfluenced by their movements.
This was noted at the time as a new departure. Actually they were
following a precedent established half a century earlier.
In the closing sessions of the unreformed Parliament, a group of
extreme Radicals, including Hume, Cobbett and Roebuck, remained
seated on the Opposition Benches whichever party was in power.
Prominent amongst them was Hume, above all others most constant
in attendance. He did not quit his post even during the dinner hour.
He filled his pockets with fruit—pears by preference—and at
approach of eight o’clock publicly ate them.
In the old House of Commons a bench at the back of the
Strangers’ Gallery was by special favour appropriated to the
reporters. The papers represented paid the doorkeepers a fee of
three guineas a session. As they numbered something over
threescore this was a source of snug revenue in supplement to the
strangers’ tributary half-crown. Ladies were not admitted to the
Strangers’ Gallery. The only place whence they could partly see, and
imperfectly hear, what was going on was by looking down through a
large hole in the ceiling immediately above the principal candle-
stocked chandelier. This aperture was the principal means of
ventilating the House, and the ladies circled round it regardless of
the egress of vitiated air. Mr. Gladstone, who sat in the old House as
member for Newark, once told me that during progress with an
important debate he saw a fan fluttering down from the ceiling. It had
dropped from the hand of one of the ladies, who suddenly found
herself in a semi-asphyxiated condition. Something more than half a
century later Mr. Gladstone was unconsciously the object of attention
from another group of ladies indomitable in desire to hear an historic
speech. On the night of the introduction of the first Home Rule Bill
there was overflowing demand for seats in the Ladies’ Gallery. When
accommodation was exhausted, the wife of the First Commissioner
of Works happily remembered that the floor of the House is
constructed of open iron network, over which a twine matting is laid.
These cover the elaborate machinery by which fresh air is constantly
let into the Chamber, escaping by apertures near the ceiling.
Standing or walking along the Iron Gallery that spans the vault, it is
quite easy to hear what is going on in the House. Here, on the
invitation of the First Commissioner’s wife, were seated a company
of ladies who, unseen, their presence unsuspected, heard every
word of the Premier’s epoch-making speech.
‘Q’ incidentally records details of procedure in marked contrast
with that of to-day. In these times, on the assembling of a newly
elected Parliament, the Oath is administered by the Clerk to
members standing in batches at small tables on the floor of the
House. In the old Parliament, members were sworn in by the Lord
Steward of His Majesty’s Household. At the same period a new
Speaker being duly elected or re-elected was led by the Mover and
Seconder from his seat to the Bar, whence he was escorted to the
Chair. To-day he is conducted direct to the Chair. When divisions
were taken in Committee of the whole House, members did not, as
at present, go forth into separate lobbies. The ‘ayes’ ranged
themselves to the right of the Speaker’s Chair, the ‘noes’ to the left,
and were counted accordingly. The practice varied when the House
was fully constituted, the Speaker in the Chair and the Mace on the
Table. In such circumstances one only of the contending parties, the
‘ayes’ or the ‘noes’ according to the nature of the business in
question, quitted the Chamber. The tellers first counted those
remaining in the House, and then, standing in the passage between
the Bar and the door, counted the others as they re-entered. The
result of the division was announced in the formula: ‘The ayes that
went out are’ so many. ‘The noes who remained are’ so many, or
otherwise according to the disposition of the opposing forces. A
quorum then as now was forty, but when the House was in
Committee the presence of eight members sufficed. ‘Q’ makes no
reference to the use of a bell announcing divisions. But he mentions
occasions on which the Mace was sent to Westminster Hall, the
Court of Request, or to the several Committee Rooms to summon
members to attend.
At the period of Parliamentary history of which ‘Q’ is the lively
chronicler, the ceremony of choosing a Speaker and obtaining Royal
Assent to the choice was identical with that first used on the
occasion of Sir Job Charlton’s election to the Chair in the time of
Charles II. The title of Speaker was bestowed because he alone had
the right to speak to or address the King in the name and on behalf
of the House of Commons. Of this privilege he customarily availed
himself at considerable length. On being summoned to the presence
of the Sovereign in the House of Lords he, in servile terms, begged
to be excused from undertaking the duties of Speaker, ‘which,’ he
protested, ‘require greater abilities than I can pretend to own.’ The
Lord Chancellor, by direction of the Sovereign, assured the modest
man that ‘having very attentively heard your discreet and handsome
discourse,’ the King would not consent to refusal of the Chair.
Thereupon the Speaker-designate launched forth into a fresh, even
more ornate, address, claiming ‘renewal of the ancient privileges of
Your most loyal and dutiful House of Commons.’ Whereto His
Majesty, speaking again by the mouth of the Lord Chancellor,
remarked, not without a sense of humour, that ‘he hath heard and
well weighed your short and eloquent oration and in the first place
much approves that you have introduced a shorter way of speaking
on these occasions.’
Up to 1883 the Speaker’s salary was, as it is to-day, £5000 a year.
In addition to his salary he received fees amounting to £2000 or
£3000 per session. On his election he was presented with 2000
ounces of plate, £1000 of equipment money, two hogsheads of
claret, £100 per annum for stationery, and a stately residence in
convenient contiguity to the House. These little extras made the post
worth at least £8000 per annum.
In the present and recent Parliament an ancient tradition is kept up
by a member for the City of London seating himself on the Treasury
Bench. Two members are privileged to take their places there, but
after his election for the City Mr. Arthur Balfour left Sir Frederick
Banbury in sole possession of the place. To-day, by the strange
derangement of party ties consequent on the war, the ex-Prime
Minister has permanently shifted his quarters to the Treasury Bench
under the leadership of a Radical Premier. In the first third of the
nineteenth century the City of London returned four members, who
not only sat on the Treasury Bench on the opening day of the new
Parliament, but arrayed themselves in scarlet gowns. Sir Frederick
Banbury stopped short of acquiring that distinction.
During the first two sessions of the reformed Parliament the
Commons met at noon for the purpose of presenting petitions and
transacting other business of minor importance. These morning
sittings, precursors of others instituted by Disraeli and since
abandoned, usually lasted till three o’clock, the House then
adjourning till five, when real business was entered upon.
Subsequently this arrangement was abandoned, the Speaker taking
the Chair at half-past three. Even then the first and freshest hour and
a half of the sitting were spent in the presentation of petitions or in
debate thereupon. The interval can be explained only upon the
assumption that the petitions were read verbatim.
In the Parliamentary procedure of to-day petitions play a part of
ever decreasing importance. Their presentation takes precedence of
all other business. But the member in charge of one is not permitted
to stray beyond briefest description of its prayer and a statement of
the number of signatories. Thereupon, by direction of the Speaker,
he thrusts the petition into a sack hanging to the left of the Speaker’s
chair, and there an end on’t. There is, it is true, a Committee of
Petitions which is supposed to examine every document. As far as
practical purposes are concerned, petitions might as well be dropped
over the Terrace into the Thames as into the mouth of the appointed
sack.
At times of popular excitement round a vexed question—by
preference connected with the Church, the sale of liquor, or, before
her ghost was laid, marriage with the deceased wife’s sister—the
flame systematically fanned is kept burning by the presentation of
monster petitions. Amid ironical cheers these are carried in by two
elderly messengers, who lay them at the foot of the Table. Having
been formally presented, they are, amid renewed merriment, carried
forth again and nothing more is heard of them, unless the Committee
on Petitions reports that there is suspicious similarity in the
handwriting of blocks of signatures, collected by an energetic person
remunerated by commission upon the aggregate number.
 The most remarkable demonstration made in modern times
happened during the short life of the Parliament elected in 1892.
Members coming down in time for prayers discovered to their
amazement the floor of the House blocked with monster rolls, such
as are seen in the street when the repair of underground telegraph
wires is in progress. The member to whose personal care this trifle
had been submitted rising to present the petition, Mr. Labouchere, on
a point of order, objected that sight of him was blocked by the
gigantic cylinders. ‘The hon. gentleman,’ he suggested, ‘should
mount one and address the Chair from the eminence.’ The
suggestion was disregarded, and in time the elderly messengers put
their shoulders to wheels and rolled the monsters out of the House.
‘Q,’ whose eagle eye nothing escapes, comments on the
preponderance of bald heads among Ministers. Occupying an idle
moment, he counted the number of bald heads and found them to
amount to one-third of the full muster. ‘Taking the whole 658,’ he
writes in one of his simple but delightful asides, ‘I should think that
perhaps a fourth part are more or less baldheaded. The number of
red heads,’ he adds, ‘is also remarkable. I should think they are
hardly less numerous than bald ones. When I come to advert to
individual members of distinction it cannot fail to strike the reader
how many are red-headed.’
This interesting inference is, if it be accepted as well-founded,
damaging to the status of the present House of Commons. I do not,
on reflection, recall a single member so decorated.
As to baldheadedness—which in the time of the prophet Elisha
was regarded as an undesirable eccentricity, public notice of which,
it will be remembered, condemned the commentators to severe
disciplinary punishment—it was, curiously enough, a marked
peculiarity among members of the House of Commons in an early
decade of the nineteenth century. I have a prized engraving
presenting a view of the interior of the House of Commons during the
sessions of 1821-3. Glancing over the crowded benches, I observe
that the proportion of baldheaded men is at least equal to that noted
by ‘Q’ in the Parliament sitting a dozen years later.
 What are known as scenes in the House were not infrequent in
‘Q’s’ time. He recalls one in which an otherwise undistinguished
member for Oxford, one Hughes Hughes, was made the butt. It was
a flash of the peculiar, not always explicable, humour of the House of
Commons, still upon occasion predominant, to refuse a gentleman a
hearing. ‘Hughes’s rising was the signal for continuous uproar,’ ‘Q’
writes. ‘At repeated intervals a sort of drone-like drumming, having
the sound of a distant hand organ or bagpipes, arose from the back
benches. Coughing, sneezing and ingeniously extended yawning
blended with other sounds. A voice from the Ministerial benches
imitated very accurately the yelp of a kennelled hound.’
For ten minutes the double-barrelled Hughes faced the music, and
when he sat down not a word save the initial ‘Sir’ had been heard
from his lips.
The nearest approach to this scene I remember happened in the
last session of the Parliament of 1868-74, when, amidst similar
uproar, Cavendish Bentinck, as one describing at the time the uproar
wrote, ‘went out behind the Speaker’s Chair and crowed thrice.’ This
was the occasion upon which Sir Charles Dilke made his
Parliamentary début. In Committee of Ways and Means he, in
uncompromising fashion that grated on the ears of loyalists, called
attention to the Civil List of Queen Victoria and moved a reduction.
Auberon Herbert, now a staid Tory, at that time suspected of a
tendency towards Republicanism, undertook to second the
amendment. Sir Charles managed amid angry interruptions to work
off his speech. Herbert, following him, was met by a storm of
resentment that made his sentences inaudible.
After uproar had prevailed for a full quarter of an hour a
shamefaced member, anxious for the dignity of the Mother of
Parliaments, called attention to the presence of strangers. Forthwith,
in accordance with the regulation then in force, the galleries were
cleared. As the occupants of the Press Gallery reluctantly departed,
they heard above the shouting the sound of cock-crowing. Looking
over the baluster they saw behind the Chair Little Ben, as Cavendish
Bentinck was called to distinguish him from his bigger kinsman,