The Historians' History of the World 05

43. The consuls and Cæsar’s nephew, Caius Julius Cæsar Octavianus, sent against Antony by the senate. Battle of Mutina. Antony defeated. Octavian obtains the consulship and the condemnation of the conspirators. Decimus Brutus taken and put to death. The second triumvirate. Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus assume the supreme power. Proscriptions and confiscations. Murder of Cicero. 42. Battle of Philippi. Defeat and death of Brutus and Cassius. Antony meets Cleopatra at Tarsus. 41. War of Perusia between Octavian and the brother and wife of Antony respecting the distribution of lands to the veterans. Octavian makes himself supreme in Italy. 40. The triumvirs divide the empire between them. 39. Treaty of Misenum. The triumvirs grant Sicily, Sardinia, and Peloponnesus to Sextus, the surviving son of Pompey. Antony goes to Egypt. 38. Sicilian War between the triumvirs and Sextus Pompeius. 36. Battle of Naulochus. Defeat and flight of Sextus. Unsuccessful campaign of Antony against the Parthians. 34. Artavasdes, king of Armenia, defeated and captured by Antony. 31. Battle of Actium. Octavian defeats the fleet of Antony and Cleopatra. 30. Suicide of Antony and Cleopatra. Egypt made a Roman province. Octavian sole ruler of the Roman dominions.

CHAPTER I. LAND AND PEOPLE

The fundamental peculiarity of Roman history is the fact that it is the history, not of a country or, in the proper sense, of a nation, but of a city. In Egypt, Thebes was at one time dominant, and Memphis at another; the supreme centre of Mesopotamia shifted between Babylon and Nineveh; whilst in Greece, Athens and Sparta long contested the supremacy. But in all these cases, with the possible exception of the Babylonian, the country as a whole gave its name to the people, and the city was, at best, only the heart of the civilisation; whereas Rome came into power as an isolated community within a little city, the very environs of which were at first hostile territory.

This city chanced to be located in Italy, but for some centuries the names “Roman” and “Italian” were in no sense synonymous. Indeed at an early date the main part of Italy was inhabited by people who were not at all under Roman dominion, and when the legions of Rome issued forth to conquer the territories and the little peninsula, the wars that led to this result had all the significance of foreign conquest. And when these conquests had spread beyond the bounds of Italy proper until, finally, they took in practically all of the civilised world that was worth conquering, except the Parthian kingdom in the far East, it was still the single city on the Tiber which was regarded as constituting the essence of the vast dominion; and the citizen who had come to share in the full rights and privileges of this vast domain needed no other specific designation than the single word “Roman.”

From the point of view of the ethnologist, Greeks and Romans had strong points of difference. The Greeks were dominated by a temperament perhaps more acute and sensitive than that of any other nation of the ancient world. They developed the fine arts in all their main branches—pottery, sculpture, architecture, grammar, and philosophy—to a height which has never been excelled by any subsequent people. But they paid the penalty of their sensibility and their versatility by an instability of purpose, a lack of civic discipline, which speedily worked their downfall.

The Romans developed comparatively little culture. Almost all the lasting monuments of the Romans were partly inspired by intercourse with the Greeks. On the other hand, as might have been expected of a people whose home was within the walls of a city, they were as eminent in the framing of laws, and in the art of government, as the Greeks were in the fine arts. The versatility and levity of the Greek, and his undisciplined life of individual freedom, ruined the nation of the noblest promise in all history. The virile stability of the Roman, and his conception of freedom as subordinate to the duties of patriotism, made him master of the civilised world for many centuries.

To these two nations the world owes, perhaps, an equal debt. The peoples of modern Europe arose from the ruins of the Roman empire, and inherited from it the soundest laws and the best examples of government; which, in some respects, they have been able to improve upon; and, when they had progressed far enough in civilisation, they discovered the culture of the Greeks and developed it, each nation in accordance with its genius and its needs, into the civilisation of the later centuries.