Part 29

Heraclius died in 612. His descendants continued to fill the throne in the persons of Constantine III. (641), Heracleonas (641), Constans II. (641), Constantine IV. (668), Justinian II. (685), until 711, when an interval of six years, divided into three reigns, made way for the rise of the Isaurian dynasty.

V.--The New Era of Charlemagne

Leo III. ascended the throne on March 25, 718, and the purple descended to his family, by the rights of heredity, for three generations. The Isaurian dynasty is most notable for the part it played in ecclesiastical history.

The introduction of images into the Christian Church had confused the simplicity of religious worship. The education of Leo, his reason, perhaps his intercourse with Jews and Arabs, had inspired him with a hatred of images. By two edicts he proscribed the existence, as well as the use, of religious pictures. This heresy of Leo and of his successors and descendants, Constantine V. (741), Leo IV. (775), and Constantine VI. (780), whose blinding by his mother Irene is one of the most tragic stories of Roman history, justified the popes in rebelling against the authority of the emperor, and in restoring and establishing the supremacy of Rome.

Gregory II. saved the city from the attacks of the Lombards, who had seized Ravenna and extinguished the series of Greek exarchs in 751. He secured the assistance of Pepin, and the real governor of the French monarchy--Charles Martel, who, by his signal victory over the Saracens, had saved Europe from the Mohammedan yoke. Twice--in 754 and 756--Pepin marched to the relief of the city. His son Charlemagne, in 774, seemed to secure the permanent safety of the ancient capital by the conquest of Lombardy, and for twenty-six years he ruled the Romans as his subjects. The people swore allegiance to his person and his family, and the elections of the popes were examined and authorised by him. The senate exercised its rights by proclaiming him patrician and of the power of the emperor; nothing was lacking except the title.

A document, known as the Forged Decretals, which assigned the free and perpetual sovereignty of Rome, Italy, and the provinces of the West to the popes by Constantine, was presented by Pope Hadrian I. to Charlemagne. This document served to absolve the popes from their debt of gratitude to the French monarch, and excused the revolt of Rome from the authority of the eastern empire.

Though Constantinople returned, under Irene, to the employment of images, and the seventh general council of Nicæa, September 24, 787, pronounced the worship of the Greeks as agreeable to scripture and reason, the division between the East and the West could not be avoided. The pope was driven to revive the western empire in order to secure the gift of the exarchy, to eradicate the claims of the Greeks, and to restore the majesty of Rome from the debasement of a provincial town. The emperors of the West would receive their crown from the successor of St. Peter, and the Roman Church would require a zealous and respectable advocate.

Inspired by these motives, Pope Leo, who had nearly fallen a victim to a conspiracy (788), and had been saved and reinstated by Charlemagne, took the opportunity presented by the French king's visit to Rome to crown him emperor. On the festival of Christmas (800), in the church of St. Peter, Leo, after the celebration of the Holy Mysteries, suddenly placed a precious crown on his head. The dome resounded with the acclamations of the people, his head and body were consecrated with the royal unction, and he was saluted, or adored, by the pontiff after the example of the Cæsars.

Europe dates a new era from his restoration of the western empire.

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THEODOR MOMMSEN

History of Rome

Theodor Mommsen was born at Garding in Schleswig on November 30, 1817. He studied at Kiel University for three years, examined Roman inscriptions in France and Italy from 1844 to 1847, and attained his first professorship at Leipzig in 1848, and the Berlin Chair of Ancient History in 1858. His greatest work was the "History of Rome," published in 1854, and its successor, the "Roman Provinces." On this work he brought to bear a research and a scholarship of almost unparalleled range and completeness. He was a man capable of vehement and occasionally unreasonable partisanship, and a strict and cold-blooded impartiality would have tempered the enthusiasm of some of his portraits and the severity of others. These defects, however, are less obvious when his history is condensed in small compass. There are cases in which his judgments are open to adverse criticism. But at the present day it may safely be affirmed that there is no extant history of Rome down to the establishment of the empire which can be regarded as rivalling that here presented. Upwards of 900 separate publications remain as a monument of Mommsen's industry. He died on November 1, 1903.

Iapygians, Etruscans, and Italians, the last certainly Indo-Europeans, are the original stocks of Italy proper. Of the Italians there are two divisions, the Latin and the Umbro-Sabellian. Central Italy was occupied by the Latins, who were established in cantons formed of village groups; which cantons at an early age formed themselves into the loose Latin League, with Alba at its head.

The Roman canton, on both banks of the Tiber, concentrated itself on the city earlier than others. The citizens consisted of the families which constituted the larger groups of clans or gentes, formed into those tribes. The remainder of the population were their dependents or slaves. At the head of the family was the father, and the whole community had its king, standing to it in the same relation as the father to the family. His power, within the law, was absolute; but he could not override it or change it on his own authority. This required the formal assent of the assembled citizens. The heads of the clans formed a separate body--the Senate--which controlled the appointment of the king, and could veto legislation.

By admission of aliens and absorption of other communities, swelling the number of dependents, was gradually created a great body of plebeians, non-citizens, who began to demand political rights; and whom it was necessary to organise for military purposes which was done by the "Servian Constitution." Gradually Rome won a supremacy in the Latin League, a position of superiority over the aggregate of the other cantons.

In this community arose three political movements: (1) On the part of the full citizen, patricii, to limit the power not of the state, but of the kings; (2) of the non-citizens, to acquire political rights; (3) of antagonism between the great landholders and the land-interests opposed to them. The first resulted in the expulsion of the monarchs, and the substitution of a dual kingship held for one year only. But in many respects their joint power was curtailed as compared with that of the monarch, while for emergencies they could appoint a temporary dictator. The change increased the power of the General Assembly, to which it became necessary to admit the non-citizen freeholders who were liable to military duties. The life tenure of the members of the Senate greatly increased the powers of that body, and intensified the antagonism of the patriarch and the plebeians.

At the same time, a landed nobility was developing; and when fresh land was acquired by the state, the Patricians claimed to control it. But the great agricultural population could not submit to this process of land absorption, and the consequent strife took the form of a demand for political recognition, which issued in the appointment of Tribunes of the Plebs, with power of administrative veto.

The struggle over privileges lasted for two hundred years. First the Canuleian law made marriage valid between patricians and plebeians, and instituted for a time military tribunes. The Licinian law, eighty years later, admitted plebeians to the consulship, and also required the employment of free labour in agriculture. The decisively democratic measure was the Horticunian law, after another seventy years, giving the exclusively plebeian assembly full legislative power. The practical effect of the changes was to create a new aristocracy, semi-plebeian in origin, and to reduce the personal power of the chief officers of state, while somewhat increasing that of the remodelled Senate; rendering it a body selfish indeed in internal matters, but essentially patriotic as well as powerful.

I.--The Description of Italy

During the period of this long constitutional struggle, Rome and her kinsfolk had first been engaged in a stubborn and ultimately successful contest with the non-Aryan Etruscan race; and then Italy had been attacked by the migrating Aryan hordes of the Celts, known as Gauls, who sacked Rome, but retired to North Italy; events giving birth to many well-known stories, probably in the main mythical. But the practical effect was to impose a greater solidarity of the Latin and kindred races, and a more decisive acceptance of Roman hegemony.

That hegemony, however, had to be established by persistent compulsion, and there were three stages in its completion. First, the subjection of the Latins and Campanians; then the struggle of Rome with the Umbrian-Samnites; finally, the decisive repulse of the Epirote invader Pyrrhus--in effect a Hellenic movement. The Roman supremacy established through the exhaustion of the valiant Samnites required to be confirmed by stern repression of attempts to recover liberty. But the Hellenic element in Italy, antagonistic to the growing Roman power, in effect invited the intervention of the Epirote chief. But his scheme was not that of an imperial statesman, but of a chivalrous and romantic warrior. His own political blunders and the iron determination of the Romans, destroyed his chances of conquest. His retirement left Rome undisputed lord of Italy; which in part shared full citizenship, in part possessed only the more restricted Latin rights, and in part only rights conceded under varying treaties.

A sense of common Italian nationality was developing. But if Rome was queen of Italy, Carthage was queen of the seas. Maritime expansion was precluded, though Rome's position fitted her for it. Carthage was the one Phoenician state which developed political as well as commercial power. The commercial cities of North Africa were in subordination to her, in the Western Mediterranean she had no rivals, her domestic government was oligarchical.

Roman intervention in the affairs of Sicily, where Carthage was the dominant power, produced the rupture between the two great states which was bound to come sooner or later. Sicily itself was the scene of the initial struggle, which taught Rome that her victories on land were liable to be nullified by the Carthaginian sea power. She resolved to build a navy, on the plan of adopting boarding tactics which would assimilate a naval engagement to a battle on land. These tactics were successful enough to equalise the fighting value of the respective fleets. The Romans were enabled to land an invading army under Regulus in Africa.

Though superior on land, the general's blundering led to a disaster, and for some time misfortune by sea and failure by land dogged the Romans. But Carthage failed to use her opportunity; she did not attempt to strike a crushing blow when she could have done so. But the private energy of Roman patriots at last placed on the seas a fleet which once more turned the scale, whereas it was on land that the brilliant Carthaginian Hamilcar had displayed his genius and daring. The first Punic War gave Rome predominance in Sicily, and a position of maritime equality. Sardinia was added to the Roman dominion, and her provincial administration came into being.

She was carrying her expansion farther over Celtic regions, when Hannibal, the son of Hamilcar, hurled himself against her, and came near to destroying her. Hamilcar had conceived the idea of imperial expansion, and given it shape by creating a dominion in Spain; he had looked forward to the life-and-death struggle with Rome that was destined to his son; for which Spain was to be the base. Hannibal, left in control in Spain, deliberately challenged Rome to war.

The challenge was accepted, war was declared, and Hannibal accomplished the amazing feat of leading an army of 60,000 men from Spain and effecting the passage of the Alps, while the Romans were landing an army in Spain. In a brilliant campaign, he defeated the stubborn Roman legions at Vercellæ and the Trebia.

But success depended not on the winning of victories by an isolated force, but on the disruption of Italy. His superiority in the field was again demonstrated at Trasimenus, but no Italian allies came in. He outwitted Fabius, and then utterly shattered at Cannæ a Roman force of double his own numbers. For a moment it seemed that Italian cohesion was weakening; but the Roman Senate and people were stirred only to a more dogged resolution.