§ 6
And yet the deterioration of the Roman State is visibly as sure a sequence as its progress. Nothing that men might then have proposed could save it. In Cicero's day the Senate had become a den of thieves. The spectacle of the wealth of Lucullus, taken in Napoleonic fashion from the opulent East, set governor after governor elsewhere upon a course of ruthless extortion which depraved Rome as infallibly as it devastated the subject States.
Roman exploitation of conquest began in the relatively moderate fashion of self-supporting victors willing to live and let live. Sicily was at first (210) taxed by Marcellus in a fashion of which Livy makes boast;[80] and after the suppression of the slaves' revolt in 131 B.C., the system was further reformed. Seventeen towns, retaining their lands, paid a fixed tax to the Republic; eight were immune, save for an annual contribution of 800,000 modius of wheat for free doles in Rome; and the rest of the island paid a tenth of all produce, as under Hiero.[81] Later, the realms of the kings of Macedonia, Pergamos, and Bithynia, and the lands of Cyrene and Cyprus, were made the public patrimony of the conquering State. Sardinia, Spain, North Africa, and Asia were in general taxed a tenth of their produce of all kinds. As the exploitation went on, individual governors added to all this regular taxation a vast irregular plunder on their own account; and nearly every attempt to impeach them was foiled by their accomplices in the Senate.[82] Verres in Sicily, Fonteius in Southern Gaul, Piso in Macedonia, Appius in Cilicia, Flaccus in Asia Minor, wrung infinite gold and loot immeasurable from the victim races by every device of rapacious brigandage, trampling on every semblance of justice, and then devised the ironic infamy of despatching corrupted or terrorised deputations of citizens to Rome to testify to the beneficence of their rule.[83]
It was a riot of robbery in which no public virtue could live. To moralise on the scarcity of Catos is an ill way of spending time if it be not recognised that Catos had latterly become as impossible as eaters of acorns in the upper grades of the ever-plundering State. Cato himself is a product of the last vestiges of the stage before universal conquest; and he begins to show in his own later years all the symptoms of the period of lawless plutocracy. To yearn for a series of such figures is to ask that men shall be capable of holding doggedly by an ethic of honest barbarism while living the lives of pirates and slavers, according no moral sympathy to the larger world of aliens and slaves, yet cherishing a high public spirit for the small world of the patrician State. The man himself was a mere moral anomaly; and in Cato the Younger, dreaming to the last of a loyal republican life, but always ready at his fellow-citizens' behest to go and beat down the rights or liberties of any other State,[84] we have the paternal bias reproduced in an incurable duality. He sought for honour among thieves, himself being one. Concerning the Catonic attitude towards the "degeneration" of Roman patrician life in the age of conquest, it has been truly said that "the policy of shameless selfishness which was pursued by the Roman Senate during this period, and reached its climax in their abominable conduct towards the unhappy, prostrate city of Carthage—the frivolous wars, tending to nothing but aggrandisement and enrichment, waged by Rome continuously after the second Punic War—destroyed the old Roman character[85] far more effectually than Grecian art and philosophy could ever have done. Henceforth there was a fearful increase in internal corruption, immorality, bribery, an insatiable eagerness for riches, disregarding everything else and impudently setting aside laws, orders of the Senate, and legal proceedings, making war unauthorised, celebrating triumphs without permission, plundering the provinces, robbing the allies."[86] And the ideal of conquest inspired it all.
We have only to ask ourselves, What was the administrative class to do? in order to see the fatality of its course. The State must needs go on seeking conquest, by reason alike of the lower-class and the upper-class problem. The administrators must administer, or rust. The moneyed men must have fresh plunder, fresh sources of profit. The proletaries must be either fed or set fighting, else they would clamour and revolt. And as the frontiers of resistance receded, and new war was more and more a matter of far-reaching campaigns, the large administering class at home, men of action devoid of progressive culture, ran to brutal vice and frantic sedition as inevitably as returned sailors to debauch; while the distant leader, passing years of camp life at the head of professional troops, became more and more surely a power extraneous to the Republic. When a State comes to depend for its coherence on a standing army, the head of the army inevitably becomes the head of the State. The Republic passed, as a matter of course, into the Empire, with its army of mercenaries, the senatorial class having outlived the main conditions of its health and energetic stability; the autocracy at once began to delete the remaining brains by banishing or slaying all who openly criticised it;[87] and the Empire, even while maintaining its power by the spell of its great traditional organisation, ran through stage after stage of civic degeneration under good and bad emperors alike, simply because it had and could have no intellectual life commensurate with its physical scope. Its function involved moral atrophy. It needs the strenuous empiricism of a Mommsen to find ground for comfort in the apparition of a Cæsar in a State that must needs worsen under Cæsars even more profoundly than it did before its malady gave Cæsar his opportunity.
Not that the Empire could of itself have died as an organism. There are no such deaths in politics; and the frequent use of the phrase testifies to a hallucination that must greatly hamper political science. The ancient generalisation[88] to the youth, maturity, and decrepitude and death of States is true only in respect of their variations of relative military and economic strength, which follow no general rule.
The comparison of the life of political bodies to that of individuals was long ago rightly rejected as vicious by Volney (Leçons d'Histoire, 1794, 6ième Séance), who insisted that political destruction occurred only through vices of polity, inasmuch as all polities have been framed with one of the three intentions of increasing, maintaining, or overthrowing. The explanation is obscure, but the negation of the old formula is just. The issue was taken up and pronounced upon to the same effect in the closing chapter of C.A. Walckenaer's Essai sur l'histoire de l'espèce humaine, 1798. (Professor Flint, in his History of the Philosophy of History, cites Walckenaer, but does not mention Volney's Leçons.) Le Play, in modern times, has put the truth clearly and strongly: "At no epoch of its history is a people fatally doomed either to progress or decline. It does not necessarily pass, like an individual, from youth to old age" (cited by H. Higgs in American Quarterly Journal of Economics, July, 1890, p. 428). It is to be regretted that Dr. Draper should have adhered to the fallacy of the necessary decay and death of nations in his suggestive work on the Intellectual Development of Europe (ed. 1875, i, 13–20; ii, 393–98). He was doubtless influenced by the American tendency to regard Europe and Asia as groups of "old countries." The word "decay" may of course be used with the implication of mere "sickness," as by Lord Mahon in the opening sentence of his Life of Belisarius; but even in that use it gives a lead to fallacy.
Had there been no swarming and aggressive barbarians, standing to later Rome as Rome had done to Carthage—collectively exigent of moral equality as Romans had once been, and therefore conjunctly mighty as against the morally etiolated Italians—the Western Roman Empire would have gone on just as the Eastern[89] so long did, just as China has so long done—would have subsisted with little or no progress, most factors of progress