A History of Rome to 565 A. D Part 1

A History of Rome to 565 A. D.

by Arthur Edward Romilly Boak.

PREFACE

This sketch of the History of Rome to 565 A. D. is primarily intended to meet the needs of introductory college courses in Roman History. However, it is hoped that it may also prove of service as a handbook for students of Roman life and literature in general. It is with the latter in mind that I have added the bibliographical note. Naturally, within the brief limits of such a text, it was impossible to defend the point of view adopted on disputed points or to take notice of divergent opinions.

Therefore, to show the great debt which I owe to the work of others, and to provide those interested in particular problems with some guide to more detailed study, I have given a list of selected references, which express, I believe, the prevailing views of modern scholarship upon the various phases of Roman History.

I wish to acknowledge my general indebtedness to Professor W. S. Ferguson of Harvard University for his guidance in my approach to the study of Roman History, and also my particular obligations to Professor W. L.

Westermann of Cornell, and to my colleagues, Professors A. L. Cross and J.

G. Winter, for reading portions of my ma.n.u.script and for much helpful criticism.

A. E. R. BOAK.

University of Michigan, October, 1921

INTRODUCTION

THE SOURCES FOR THE STUDY OF EARLY ROMAN HISTORY

The student beginning the study of Roman History through the medium of the works of modern writers cannot fail to note wide differences in the treatment accorded by them to the early centuries of the life of the Roman State. These differences are mainly due to differences of opinion among moderns as to the credibility of the ancient accounts of this period. And so it will perhaps prove helpful to give a brief review of these sources, and to indicate the estimate of their value which is reflected in this book.

The earliest Roman historical records were in the form of annals, that is, brief notices of important events in connection with the names of the consuls or other eponymous officials for each year. They may be compared to the early monastic chronicles of the Middle Ages. Writing was practised in Rome as early as the sixth century B. C. and there can be no doubt that the names of consuls or their subst.i.tutes were recorded from the early years of the republic, although the form of the record is unknown. It is in the annals that the oldest list of the consuls was preserved, the Capitoline consular and triumphal Fasti or lists being reconstructions of the time of Augustus.

The authorship of the earliest annals is not recorded. However, at the opening of the second century B. C. the Roman pontiffs had in their custody annals which purported to run back to the foundation of the city, including the regal period. We know also that as late as the time of the Gracchi it was customary for the Pontifex Maximus to record on a tablet for public inspection the chief events of each year. When this custom began is uncertain and it can only be proven for the time when the Romans had commenced to undertake maritime wars. From these pontifical records were compiled the so-called _annales Maximi_, or chief annals, whose name permits the belief that briefer compilations were also in existence. There were likewise commentaries preserved in the priestly colleges, which contained ritualistic formulae, as well as attempted explanations of the origins of usages and ceremonies.

Apart from these annals and commentaries there existed but little historical material before the close of the third century B. C. There was no Roman literature; no trace remains of any narrative poetry, nor of family chronicles. Brief funerary inscriptions, like that of Scipio Barbatus, appear in the course of the third century, and laudatory funeral orations giving the records of family achievements seem to have come into vogue about the end of the same century.

However, the knowledge of writing made possible the inscription upon stone or other material of public doc.u.ments which required to be preserved with exactness. Thus laws and treaties were committed to writing. But the Romans, unlike the Greeks, paid little attention to the careful preservation of other doc.u.ments and, until a late date, did not even keep a record of the minor magistrates. Votive offerings and other dedications were also inscribed, but as with the laws and treaties, few of these survived into the days of historical writing, owing to neglect and the destruction wrought in the city by the Gauls in 387 B. C.

Nor had the Greeks paid much attention to Roman history prior to the war with Pyrrhus in 281 B. C., although from that time onwards Greek historians devoted themselves to the study of Roman affairs. From this date the course of Roman history is fairly clear. However, as early as the opening of the fourth century B. C. the Greeks had sought to bring the Romans into relation with other civilized peoples of the ancient world by ascribing the foundation of Rome to Aeneas and the exiles from Troy; a tale which had gained acceptance in Rome by the close of the third century.

The first step in Roman historical writing was taken at the close of the Second Punic War by Quintus Fabius Pictor, who wrote in Greek a history of Rome from its foundation to his own times. A similar work, also in Greek, was composed by his contemporary, Lucius Cincius Alimentus. The oldest traditions were thus wrought into a connected version, which has been preserved in some pa.s.sages of Polybius, but to a larger extent in the fragments of the _Library of Universal History_ compiled by Diodorus the Sicilian about 30 B. C. Existing portions of his work (books 11 to 20) cover the period from 480 to 302 B. C.; and as his library is little more than a series of excerpts his selections dealing with Roman history reflect his sources with little contamination.

Other Roman chroniclers of the second century B. C. also wrote in Greek and, although early in that century Ennius wrote his epic relating the story of Rome from the settlement of Aeneas, it was not until about 168 that the first historical work in Latin prose appeared. This was the _Origins_ of Marcus Porcius Cato, which contained an account of the mythical origins of Rome and other Italian cities, and was subsequently expanded to cover the period from the opening of the Punic Wars to 149 B. C.

Contemporary history soon attracted the attention of the Romans but they did not neglect the earlier period. In their treatment of the latter new tendencies appear about the time of Sulla under patriotic and rhetorical stimuli. The aim of historians now became to provide the public with an account of the early days of Rome that would be commeasurate with her later greatness, and to adorn this narrative, in Greek fashion, with anecdotes, speeches, and detailed descriptions, which would enliven their pages and fascinate their readers. Their material they obtained by invention, by falsification, and by the incorporation into Roman history of incidents from the history of other peoples. These writers were not strictly historians, but writers of historical romance. Their chief representative was Valerius Antias.

The Ciceronian age saw great vigor displayed in antiquarian research, with the object of explaining the origin of ancient Roman customs, ceremonies, inst.i.tutions, monuments, and legal formulae, and of establishing early Roman chronology. In this field the greatest activity was shown by Marcus Terentius Varro, whose _Antiquities_ deeply influenced his contemporaries and successors.

In the age of Augustus, between 27 B. C. and 19 A. D., Livy wrote his great history of Rome from its beginnings. His work summed up the efforts of his predecessors and gave to the history of Rome down to his own times the form which it preserved for the rest of antiquity. Although it is lacking in critical ac.u.men in the handling of sources, and in an understanding for political and military history, the dramatic and literary qualities of his work have ensured its popularity. Of it there have been preserved the first ten books (to 293 B. C.), and books 21 to 45 (from 218 to 167 B. C.). A contemporary of Livy was the Greek writer Dionysius of Halicarna.s.sus, who wrote a work called _Roman Antiquities_, which covered the history of Rome down to 265 B. C. The earlier part of his work has also been preserved. In general he depended upon Varro and Livy, and gives substantially the same view of early Roman history as the latter.

What these later writers added to the meagre annalistic narrative preserved in Diodorus is of little historical value, except in so far as it shows what the Romans came to believe with regard to their own past.

The problem which faced the later Roman historians was the one which faces writers of Roman history today, namely, to explain the origins and early development of the Roman state. And their explanation does not deserve more credence than a modern reconstruction simply because they were nearer in point of time to the period in question, for they had no wealth of historical materials which have since been lost, and they were not animated by a desire to reach the truth at all costs nor guided by rational principles of historical criticism. Accordingly we must regard as mythical the traditional narrative of the founding of Rome and of the regal period, and for the history of the republic to the time of the war with Pyrrhus we should rely upon the list of eponymous magistrates, whose variations indicate political crises, supplemented by the account in Diodorus, with the admission that this itself is not infallible. All that supplements or deviates from this we should frankly acknowledge to be of a hypothetical nature. Therefore we should concede the impossibility of giving a complete and adequate account of the history of these centuries and refrain from doing ourselves what we criticize in the Roman historians.

PART I

THE FORERUNNERS OF ROME IN ITALY

A HISTORY OF ROME TO 565 A. D.

CHAPTER I

THE GEOGRAPHY OF ITALY

Italy, ribbed by the Apennines, girdled by the Alps and the sea, juts out like a "long pier-head" from Europe towards the northern coast of Africa.

It includes two regions of widely differing physical characteristics: the northern, continental; the southern, peninsular. The peninsula is slightly larger than the continental portion: together their area is about 91,200 square miles.

*Continental Italy.* The continental portion of Italy consists of the southern watershed of the Alps and the northern watershed of the Apennines, with the intervening lowland plain, drained, for the most part, by the river Po and its numerous tributaries. On the north, the Alps extend in an irregular crescent of over 1200 miles from the Mediterranean to the Adriatic. They rise abruptly on the Italian side, but their northern slope is gradual, with easy pa.s.ses leading over the divide to the southern plain. Thus they invite rather than deter immigration from central Europe. East and west continental Italy measures around 320 miles; its width from north to south does not exceed seventy miles.

*The peninsula.* The southern portion of Italy consists of a long, narrow peninsula, running northwest and southeast between the Mediterranean and Adriatic seas, and terminating in two promontories, which form the toe and heel of the "Italian boot." The length of the peninsula is 650 miles; its breadth is nowhere more than 125 miles. In striking contrast to the plains of the Po, southern Italy is traversed throughout by the parallel ridges of the Apennines, which give it an endless diversity of hill and valley.

The average height of these mountains, which form a sort of vertebrate system for the peninsula (_Apennino dorso Italia dividitur_, Livy x.x.xvi, 15), is about 4,000 feet, and even their highest peaks (9,500 feet) are below the line of perpetual snow. The Apennine chain is highest on its eastern side where it approaches closely to the Adriatic, leaving only a narrow strip of coast land, intersected by numerous short mountain torrents. On the west the mountains are lower and recede further from the sea, leaving the wide lowland areas of Etruria, Latium and Campania. On this side, too, are rivers of considerable length, navigable for small craft; the Volturnus and Liris, the Tiber and the Arno, whose valleys link the coast with the highlands of the interior.

*The **coast-line**.* In comparison with Greece, Italy presents a striking regularity of coast-line. Throughout its length of over 2000 miles it has remarkably few deep bays or good harbors, and these few are almost all on the southern and western sh.o.r.es. Thus the character of the Mediterranean coast of Italy, with its fertile lowlands, its rivers, its harbors, and its general southerly aspect, rendered it more inviting and accessible to approach from the sea than the eastern coast, and determined its leadership in the cultural and material advancement of the peninsula.

*Climate.* The climate of Italy as a whole, like that of other Mediterranean lands, is characterized by a high average temperature, and an absence of extremes of heat or cold. Nevertheless, it varies greatly in different localities, according to their northern or southern situation, their elevation, and their proximity to the sea. In the Po valley there is a close approach to the continental climate of central Europe, with a marked difference between summer and winter temperatures and clearly marked transitional periods of spring and autumn. On the other hand, in the south of the peninsula the climate becomes more tropical, with its periods of winter rain and summer drought, and a rapid transition between the moist and the dry seasons.

*Malaria.* Both in antiquity and in modern times the disease from which Italy has suffered most has been the dreaded malaria. The explanation is to be found in the presence of extensive marshy areas in the river valleys and along the coast. The ravages of this disease have varied according as the progress of civilization has brought about the cultivation and drainage of the affected areas or its decline has wrought the undoing of this beneficial work.

*Forests.* In striking contrast to their present baldness, the slopes of the Apennines were once heavily wooded, and the well-tilled fields of the Po valley were also covered with tall forests. Timber for houses and ships was to be had in abundance, and as late as the time of Augustus Italy was held to be a well-forested country.

*Minerals.* The mineral wealth of Italy has never been very great at any time. In antiquity the most important deposits were the iron ores of the island of Elba, and the copper mines of Etruria and Liguria. For a time, the gold washings in the valleys of the Graian Alps were worked with profit.

*Agriculture.* The true wealth of Italy lay in the richness of her soil, which generously repaid the labor of agriculturist or horticulturist. The lowland areas yielded large crops of grain of all sorts-millet, maize, wheat, oats and barley-while legumes were raised in abundance everywhere.

Campania was especially fertile and is reported to have yielded three successive crops annually. The vine and the olive flourished, and their cultivation eventually became even more profitable than the raising of grain.

The valleys and mountain sides afforded excellent pasturage at all seasons, and the raising of cattle and sheep ranked next in importance to agricultural pursuits among the country's industries.

*The **islands**: Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica.* The geographical location of the three large islands, Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica, links their history closely with that of the Italian peninsula. The large triangle of Sicily (11,290 sq. mi.) is separated from the southwest extremity of Italy by the narrow straits of Rhegium, and lies like a stepping-stone between Europe and Africa. Its situation, and the richness of its soil, which caused it to become one of the granaries of Rome, made it of far greater historical importance than the other two islands. Sardinia (9,400 sq. mi.) and Corsica (3,376 sq. mi.), owing to their rugged, mountainous character and their greater remoteness from the coast of Italy, have been always, from both the economic and the cultural standpoint, far behind the more favored Sicily.

*The historical significance of Italy's configuration and location.* The configuration of the Italian peninsula, long, narrow, and traversed by mountain ridges, hindered rather than helped its political unification.