The History of Rome by Theodor Mommsen (highly recommended books TXT) 📖

stood, and submitted it to the decision of those assembled whether they would yield or defend themselves to the last man— only adjuring them to resolve and to act not each one for himself, but all in unison. The more courageous view found several supporters; it was proposed to manumit on behalf of the state the slaves capable of arms, which however Cato rejected as an illegal encroachment on private property, and suggested in its stead a patriotic appeal to the slave-owners. But soon this fit of resolution in an assembly consisting in great part of African merchants passed off, and they agreed to capitulate. Thereupon when Faustus Sulla, son of the regent, and Lucius Afranius arrived in Utica with a strong division of cavalry from the field of battle, Cato still made an attempt to hold the town through them; but he indignantly rejected their demand to let them first of all put to death the untrustworthy citizens of Utica en masse, and chose to let the last stronghold of the republicans fall into the hands of the monarch without resistance rather than to profane the last moments of the republic by such a massacre. After he had— partly by his authority, partly by liberal largesses—checked so far as he could the fury of the soldiery against the unfortunate Uticans; after he had with touching solicitude furnished to those who preferred not to trust themselves to Caesar's mercy the means for flight, and to those who wished to remain the opportunity of capitulating under the most tolerable conditions, so far as his ability reached; and after having thoroughly satisfied himself that he could render to no one any farther aid, he held himself released from his command, retired to his bedchamber, and plunged his sword into his breast.

The Leaders of the Republicans Put to Death

Of the other fugitive leaders only a few escaped. The cavalry that fled from Thapsus encountered the bands of Sittius, and were cut down or captured by them; their leaders Afranius and Faustus were delivered up to Caesar, and, when the latter did not order their immediate execution, they were slain in a tumult by his veterans. The commander-in-chief Metellus Scipio with the fleet of the defeated party fell into the power of the cruisers of Sittius and, when they were about to lay hands on him, stabbed himself. King Juba, not unprepared for such an issue, had in that case resolved to die in a way which seemed to him befitting a king, and had caused an enormous funeral pile to be prepared in the market-place of his city Zama, which was intended to consume along with his body all his treasures and the dead bodies of the whole citizens of Zama. But the inhabitants of the town showed no desire to let themselves be employed by way of decoration for the funeral rites of the African Sardanapalus; and they closed the gates against the king when fleeing from the battle-field he appeared, accompanied by Marcus Petreius, before their city. The king—one of those natures that become savage amidst a life of dazzling and insolent enjoyment, and prepare for themselves even out of death an intoxicating feast— resorted with his companion to one of his country houses, caused a copious banquet to be served up, and at the close of the feast challenged Petreius to fight him to death in single combat. It was the conqueror of Catilina that received his death at the hand of the king; the latter thereupon caused himself to be stabbed by one of his slaves. The few men of eminence that escaped, such as Labienus and Sextus Pompeius, followed the elder brother of the latter to Spain and sought, like Sertorius formerly, a last refuge of robbers and pirates in the waters and the mountains of that still half-independent land.

Regulation of Africa

Without resistance Caesar regulated the affairs of Africa. As Curio had already proposed, the kingdom of Massinissa was broken up. The most eastern portion or region of Sitifis was united with the kingdom of Bocchus king of East Mauretania,(51) and the faithful king Bogud of Tingis was rewarded with considerable gifts. Cirta (Constantine) and the surrounding district, hitherto possessed under the supremacy of Juba by the prince Massinissa and his son Arabion, were conferred on the condottiere Publius Sittius that he might settle his half-Roman bands there;(52) but at the same time this district, as well as by far the largest and most fertile portion of the late Numidian kingdom, were united as "New Africa" with the older province of Africa, and the defence of the country along the coast against the roving tribes of the desert, which the republic had entrusted to a client-king, was imposed by the new ruler on the empire itself.

The Victory of Monarchy

The struggle, which Pompeius and the republicans had undertaken against the monarchy of Caesar, thus terminated, after having lasted for four years, in the complete victory of the new monarch. No doubt the monarchy was not established for the first time on the battle-fields of Pharsalus and Thapsus; it might already be dated from the moment when Pompeius and Caesar in league had established their joint rule and overthrown the previous aristocratic constitution. Yet it was only those baptisms of blood of the ninth August 706 and the sixth April 708 that set aside the conjoint rule so opposed to the nature of absolute dominion, and conferred fixed status and formal recognition on the new monarchy. Risings of pretenders and republican conspiracies might ensue and provoke new commotions, perhaps even new revolutions and restorations; but the continuity of the free republic that had been uninterrupted for five hundred years was broken through, and monarchy was established throughout the range of the wide Roman empire by the legitimacy of accomplished fact.

The End of the Republic

The constitutional struggle was at an end; and that it was so, was proclaimed by Marcus Cato when he fell on his sword at Utica. For many years he had been the foremost man in the struggle of the legitimate republic against its oppressors; he had continued it, long after he had ceased to cherish any hope of victory. But now the struggle itself had become impossible; the republic which Marcus Brutus had founded was dead and never to be revived; what were the republicans now to do on the earth? The treasure was carried off, the sentinels were thereby relieved; who could blame them if they departed? There was more nobility, and above all more judgment, in the death of Cato than there had been in his life. Cato was anything but a great man; but with all that short-sightedness, that perversity, that dry prolixity, and those spurious phrases which have stamped him, for his own and for all time, as the ideal of unreflecting republicanism and the favourite of all who make it their hobby, he was yet the only man who honourably and courageously championed in the last struggle the great system doomed to destruction. Just because the shrewdest lie feels itself inwardly annihilated before the simple truth, and because all the dignity and glory of human nature ultimately depend not on shrewdness but on honesty, Cato has played a greater part in history than many men far superior to him in intellect. It only heightens the deep and tragic significance of his death that he was himself a fool; in truth it is just because Don Quixote is a fool that he is a tragic figure. It is an affecting fact, that on that world-stage, on which so many great and wise men had moved and acted, the fool was destined to give the epilogue. He too died not in vain. It was a fearfully striking protest of the republic against the monarchy, that the last republican went as the first monarch came—a protest which tore asunder like gossamer all that so-called constitutional character with which Caesar invested his monarchy, and exposed in all its hypocritical falsehood the shibboleth of the reconciliation of all parties, under the aegis of which despotism grew up. The unrelenting warfare which the ghost of the legitimate republic waged for centuries, from Cassius and Brutus down to Thrasea and Tacitus, nay, even far later, against the Caesarian monarchy—a warfare of plots and of literature— was the legacy which the dying Cato bequeathed to his enemies. This republican opposition derived from Cato its whole attitude— stately, transcendental in its rhetoric, pretentiously rigid, hopeless, and faithful to death; and accordingly it began even immediately after his death to revere as a saint the man who in his lifetime was not unfrequently its laughing-stock and its scandal. But the greatest of these marks of respect was the involuntary homage which Caesar rendered to him, when he made an exception to the contemptuous clemency with which he was wont to treat his opponents, Pompeians as well as republicans, in the case of Cato alone, and pursued him even beyond the grave with that energetic hatred which practical statesmen are wont to feel towards antagonists opposing them from a region of ideas which they regard as equally dangerous and impracticable.

CHAPTER XI

The Old Republic and the New Monarchy

Character of Caesar

The new monarch of Rome, the first ruler over the whole domain of Romano-Hellenic civilization, Gaius Julius Caesar, was in his fifty-sixth year (born 12 July 652?) when the battle at Thapsus, the last link in a long chain of momentous victories, placed the decision as to the future of the world in his hands. Few men have had their elasticity so thoroughly put to the proof as Caesar— the sole creative genius produced by Rome, and the last produced by the ancient world, which accordingly moved on in the path that he marked out for it until its sun went down. Sprung from one of the oldest noble families of Latium—which traced back its lineage to the heroes of the Iliad and the kings of Rome, and in fact to the Venus-Aphrodite common to both nations—he spent the years of his boyhood and early manhood as the genteel youth of that epoch were wont to spend them. He had tasted the sweetness as well as the bitterness of the cup of fashionable life, had recited and declaimed, had practised literature and made verses in his idle hours, had prosecuted love-intrigues of every sort, and got himself initiated into all the mysteries of shaving, curls, and ruffles pertaining to the toilette-wisdom of the day, as well as into the still more mysterious art of always borrowing and never paying. But the flexible steel of that nature was proof against even these dissipated and flighty courses; Caesar retained both his bodily vigour and his elasticity of mind and of heart unimpaired. In fencing and in riding he was a match for any of his soldiers, and his swimming saved his life at Alexandria; the incredible rapidity of his journeys, which usually for the sake of gaining time were performed by night—a thorough contrast to the procession-like slowness with which Pompeius moved from one place to another— was the astonishment of his contemporaries and not the least among the causes of his success. The mind was like the body. His remarkable power of intuition revealed itself in the precision and practicability of all his arrangements, even where he gave orders without having seen with his own eyes. His memory was matchless, and it was easy for him to carry on several occupations simultaneously with equal self-possession. Although a gentleman, a man of genius, and a monarch, he had still a heart. So long as he lived, he cherished the purest veneration for his worthy mother Aurelia (his father having died early); to his wives and above all to his daughter Julia he devoted an honourable affection, which was not without reflex influence even on political affairs. With the ablest and most excellent men of his time, of high and of humbler rank, he maintained noble relations of mutual fidelity, with each after his kind. As he himself never abandoned any of his partisans after the pusillanimous and unfeeling manner of Pompeius, but adhered to his friends—and that not merely from calculation—through good and bad times without wavering, several of these, such as Aulus Hirtius and Gaius Matius, gave, even after his death, noble testimonies of their attachment to him.

If in a nature so harmoniously organized any one aspect of it may be singled out as characteristic, it is this—that he stood aloof from all ideology and everything fanciful. As a matter of course, Caesar was a man of passion, for without passion there is no genius; but his passion was never stronger than he could control. He had had his season of youth, and song, love, and wine had taken lively possession of his spirit; but with him they did not penetrate to the inmost