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

Such initial steps can be pointed out in all the provinces of the empire, with the exception of the poorest and least important of all, Sardinia. How Caesar proceeded in Northern Gaul, we have already set forth;(95) the Latin language there obtained throughout official recognition, though not yet employed for all branches of public intercourse, and the colony of Noviodunum (Nyon) arose on the Leman lake as the most northerly town with an Italian constitution.

Spain

In Spain, which was presumably at that time the most densely peopled country of the Roman empire, not merely were Caesarian colonists settled in the important Helleno-Iberian seaport town of Emporiae by the side of the old population; but, as recently-discovered records have shown, a number of colonists probably taken predominantly from the proletariate of the capital were provided for in the town of Urso (Osuna), not far from Seville in the heart of Andalusia, and perhaps also in several other townships of this province. The ancient and wealthy mercantile city of Gades, whose municipal system Caesar even when praetor had remodelled suitably to the times, now obtained from the Imperator the full rights of the Italian -municipia-(705) and became—what Tusculum had been in Italy(96)—the first extra-Italian community not founded by Rome which was admitted into the Roman burgess-union. Some years afterwards (709) similar rights were conferred also on some other Spanish communities, and Latin rights presumably on still more.

Carthage

In Africa the project, which Gaius Gracchus had not been allowed to bring to an issue, was now carried out, and on the spot where the city of the hereditary foes of Rome had stood, 3000 Italian colonists and a great number of the tenants on lease and sufferance resident in the Carthaginian territory were settled; and the new "Venus-colony," the Roman Carthage, throve with amazing rapidity under the incomparably favourable circumstances of the locality. Utica, hitherto the capital and first commercial town in the province, had already been in some measure compensated beforehand, apparently by the bestowal of Latin rights, for the revival of its superior rival. In the Numidian territory newly annexed to the empire the important Cirta and the other communities assigned to the Roman condottiere Publius Sittius for himself and his troops(97) obtained the legal position of Roman military colonies. The stately provincial towns indeed, which the insane fury of Juba and of the desperate remnant of the constitutional party had converted into ruins, did not revive so rapidly as they had been reduced to ashes, and many a ruinous site recalled long afterwards this fatal period; but the two new Julian colonies, Carthage and Cirta, became and continued to be the centres of Africano-Roman civilization.

Corinth
The East

In the desolate land of Greece, Caesar, besides other plans such as the institution of a Roman colony in Buthrotum (opposite Corfu), busied himself above all with the restoration of Corinth. Not only was a considerable burgess-colony conducted thither, but a plan was projected for cutting through the isthmus, so as to avoid the dangerous circumnavigation of the Peloponnesus and to make the whole traffic between Italy and Asia pass through the Corintho- Saronic gulf. Lastly even in the remote Hellenic east the monarch called into existence Italian settlements; on the Black Sea, for instance, at Heraclea and Sinope, which towns the Italian colonists shared, as in the case of Emporiae, with the old inhabitants; on the Syrian coast, in the important port of Berytus, which like Sinope obtained an Italian constitution; and even in Egypt, where a Roman station was established on the lighthouse-island commanding the harbour of Alexandria.

Extension of the Italian Municipal Constitution to the Provinces

Through these ordinances the Italian municipal freedom was carried into the provinces in a manner far more comprehensive than had been previously the case. The communities of full burgesses—that is, all the towns of the Cisalpine province and the burgess-colonies and burgess-municipia—scattered in Transalpine Gaul and elsewhere— were on an equal footing with the Italian, in so far as they administered their own affairs, and even exercised a certainly limited jurisdiction; while on the other hand the more important processes came before the Roman authorities competent to deal with them—as a rule the governor of the province.(98) The formally autonomous Latin and the other emancipated communities-thus including all those of Sicily and of Narbonese Gaul, so far as they were not burgess-communities, and a considerable number also in the other provinces—had not merely free administration, but probably unlimited jurisdiction; so that the governor was only entitled to interfere there by virtue of his— certainly very arbitrary—administrative control. No doubt even earlier there had been communities of full burgesses within the provinces of governors, such as Aquileia, and Narbo, and whole governors' provinces, such as Cisalpine Gaul, had consisted of communities with Italian constitution; but it was, if not in law, at least in a political point of view a singularly important innovation, that there was now a province which as well as Italy was peopled solely by Roman burgesses,(99) and that others promised to become such.

Italy and the Provinces Reduced to One Level

With this disappeared the first great practical distinction that separated Italy from the provinces; and the second—that ordinarily no troops were stationed in Italy, while they were stationed in the provinces—was likewise in the course of disappearing; troops were now stationed only where there was a frontier to be defended, and the commandants of the provinces in which this was not the case, such as Narbo and Sicily, were officers only in name. The formal contrast between Italy and the provinces, which had at all times depended on other distinctions,(100) continued certainly even now to subsist, for Italy was the sphere of civil jurisdiction and of consuls and praetors, while the provinces were districts under the jurisdiction of martial law and subject to proconsuls and propraetors; but the procedure according to civil and according to martial law had for long been practically coincident, and the different titles of the magistrates signified little after the one Imperator was over all.

In all these various municipal foundations and ordinances— which are traceable at least in plan, if not perhaps all in execution, to Caesar—a definite system is apparent. Italy was converted from the mistress of the subject peoples into the mother of the renovated Italo-Hellenic nation. The Cisalpine province completely equalized with the mother-country was a promise and a guarantee that, in the monarchy of Caesar just as in the healthier times of the republic, every Latinized district might expect to be placed on an equal footing by the side of its elder sisters and of the mother herself. On the threshold of full national and political equalization with Italy stood the adjoining lands, the Greek Sicily and the south of Gaul, which was rapidly becoming Latinized. In a more remote stage of preparation stood the other provinces of the empire, in which, just as hitherto in southern Gaul Narbo had been a Roman colony, the great maritime cities—Emporiae, Gades, Carthage, Corinth, Heraclea in Pontus, Sinope, Berytus, Alexandria— now became Italian or Helleno-Italian communities, the centres of an Italian civilization even in the Greek east, the fundamental pillars of the future national and political levelling of the empire. The rule of the urban community of Rome over the shores of the Mediterranean was at an end; in its stead came the new Mediterranean state, and its first act was to atone for the two greatest outrages which that urban community had perpetrated on civilization. While the destruction of the two greatest marts of commerce in the Roman dominions marked the turning-point at which the protectorate of the Roman community degenerated into political tyrannizing over, and financial exaction from, the subject lands, the prompt and brilliant restoration of Carthage and Corinth marked the foundation of the new great commonwealth which was to train up all the regions on the Mediterranean to national and political equality, to union in a genuine state. Well might Caesar bestow on the city of Corinth in addition to its far-famed ancient name the new one of "Honour to Julius" (-Lavs Jvli-).

Organization of the New Empire

While thus the new united empire was furnished with a national character, which doubtless necessarily lacked individuality and was rather an inanimate product of art than a fresh growth of nature, it further had need of unity in those institutions which express the general life of nations—in constitution and administration, in religion and jurisprudence, in money, measures, and weights; as to which, of course, local diversities of the most varied character were quite compatible with essential union. In all these departments we can only speak of the initial steps, for the thorough formation of the monarchy of Caesar into an unity was the work of the future, and all that he did was to lay the foundation for the building of centuries. But of the lines, which the great man drew in these departments, several can still be recognized; and it is more pleasing to follow him here, than in the task of building from the ruins of the nationalities.

Census of the Empire

As to constitution and administration, we have already noticed elsewhere the most important elements of the new unity— the transition of the sovereignty from the municipal council of Rome to the sole master of the Mediterranean monarchy; the conversion of that municipal council into a supreme imperial council representing Italy and the provinces; above all, the transference—now commenced— of the Roman, and generally of the Italian, municipal organization to the provincial communities. This latter course—the bestowal of Latin, and thereafter of Roman, rights on the communities ripe for full admission to the united state—gradually of itself brought about uniform communal arrangements. In one respect alone this process could not be waited for. The new empire needed immediately an institution which should place before the government at a glance the principal bases of administration—the proportions of population and property in the different communities— in other words an improved census. First the census of Italy was reformed. According to Caesar's ordinance(101)—which probably, indeed, only carried out the arrangements which were, at least as to principle, adopted in consequence of the Social war— in future, when a census took place in the Roman community, there were to be simultaneously registered by the highest authority in each Italian community the name of every municipal burgess and that of his father or manumitter, his district, his age, and his property; and these lists were to be furnished to the Roman censor early enough to enable him to complete in proper time the general list of Roman burgesses and of Roman property. That it was Caesar's intention to introduce similar institutions also in the provinces is attested partly by the measurement and survey of the whole empire ordered by him, partly by the nature of the arrangement itself; for it in fact furnished the general instrument appropriate for procuring, as well in the Italian as in the non-Italian communities of the state, the information requisite for the central administration. Evidently here too it was Caesar's intention to revert to the traditions of the earlier republican times, and to reintroduce the census of the empire, which the earlier republic had effected— essentially in the same way as Caesar effected the Italian— by analogous extension of the institution of the urban censorship with its set terms and other essential rules to all the subject communities of Italy and Sicily.(102) This had been one of the first institutions which the torpid aristocracy allowed to drop, and in this way deprived the supreme administrative authority of any view of the resources in men and taxation at its disposal and consequently of all possibility of an effective control.(103) The indications still extant, and the very connection of things, show irrefragably that Caesar made preparations to renew the general census that had been obsolete for centuries.

Religion of the Empire

We need scarcely say that in religion and in jurisprudence no thorough levelling could be thought of; yet with all toleration towards local faiths and municipal statutes the new state needed a common worship corresponding to the Italo-Hellenic nationality and a general code of law superior to the municipal statutes. It needed them; for de facto both were already in existence. In the field of religion men had for centuries been busied in fusing together the Italian and Hellenic worships partly by external adoption, partly by internal adjustment of their respective conceptions of the gods; and owing to the pliant formless character of the Italian gods, there had been no great difficulty in resolving Jupiter into Zeus, Venus into Aphrodite, and so every essential idea of the Latin faith into its Hellenic counterpart. The Italo-Hellenic religion stood forth in its outlines ready-made; how much in this very department men were conscious of having gone beyond the specifically Roman point of view and advanced towards an Italo-Hellenic quasi-nationality, is shown by the distinction made in the already-mentioned theology of Varro between the "common" gods, that