MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE. JULY, 1869. ROMAN IMPERIALISM. LECTURES DELIVERED AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION, 1869. BY PROFESSOR SEELEY. I. THE GREAT ROMAN REVOLUTION. IN the famous controversy between Julius Cæsar and Brutus the present age takes a different side from the last. Brutus used to be considered in the right, but public opinion now declares for Cæsar. Cæsar's partisans, however, may state their case in two ways. They may represent him as having simply achieved a great administrative reform, and made government more efficient at the expense of republican liberties. This they may consider to have been on the whole a necessary and useful work, and they may respect Cæsar as a practical statesman, who had the wise hardihood to abolish venerated institutions when they had become, in the lapse of time, mischievous. But it is also possible to represent him as a great popular hero, the hope of all the subject nationalities. of Rome, carried to power in their arms, and executing justice in their behalf upon the tyrant aristocracy that had oppressed them. If we take this view, no admiration or enthusiasm for him can be too ardent; and we not only regard. Brutus and Cæsar differently from our fathers, but as it were reverse their positions. Cæsar becomes Brutus, and Brutus Cæsar. Brutus is now the tyrant, for he represents the oppressive aristocracy, and Cæsar is the tyrannicide, who armed himself in the cause of the nations, and stabbed the oppressor, No. 117.-VOL. XX. once at Pharsalus, again at Thapsus, and again at Munda. This latter view might be supported if we could assume that all the consequences of the revolution which Cæsar conducted were intended by him and by his party. By that revolution in the end the exclusive domination of the Roman aristocracy and of the City was destroyed; the provincials, who before had been insolently oppressed, now began to be more considered and more mercifully treated. If this could not have happened without the deliberate intention of those who achieved it, then the Cæsarians become at once enlightened Liberals, and Cæsar the greatest Liberal leader that ever lived. We are obliged then to suppose a vast tide of enthusiastic sentiment pervading the better part of the citizens, and the provincials moved by an ecstatic hope as the champion of mankind advances towards his final triumph, striking down one after another the enemies of the good cause. The Roman revolution is thus made to resemble the French, and Cæsar becomes a hero, a paragon, in whom appear the popular talents of Mirabeau, without his betrayal of the popular cause; the high aims of the Girondins, without their illusions; and the genius of Napoleon for war and government, without his egotism and brutality. But the truth is that what Cæsar and his party intended is to be carefully distinguished from what they actually accomplished. The revolution had many beneficial results, which were indirect and little contemplated by its principal authors. If we study the movement itself we shall find that Cæsar was no champion of the provincials, that his party had no notion of redressing the wrongs of the provincials, that they were inspired by no desire to establish any general principle whatever, and by no enthusiasm except a military enthusiasm for their leader. The true nature of the revolution will very clearly appear, and its resemblance to the French Revolution will be shown to be an illusion. It is certain, in the first place, that Cæsar did not in any degree owe his elevation to the favour of the provincials. He owed his elevation to the admirable efficiency of his army, and to his admirable use of it. This army contained no doubt Gallic auxiliaries, but the great muster of provincials was on the side of the Senate. Cæsar's provincial auxiliaries were better drilled, and, like his Roman legionaries, they were no doubt personally attached to him; but that he was the champion of their interests against the Senate never occurred to them. There is no trace that the provinces conceived themselves to have any special interest in the quarrel. According to their personal connexions with the two leaders they ranged themselves on one side or the other-the East for the most part with Pompeius, while Gaul was at the service of Cæsar. Their hearts, apparently, were not in the contest at all; but, if we ask on which side were their hands, we shall be obliged to reply that so little did they understand Cæsar to be their champion that the majority of them were ranged against him on the side of their oppressors. But let us go on to ask, Why should they have regarded Cæsar as their champion? What was there in his career which might lead them to suppose him more kindly disposed to them than any other proconsul of his time? His most conspicuous act was the conquest of Gaul. Let it be granted that the greatest service he could do to Gaul was to conquer it. Let us even grant, for the sake of argument, that he was himself aware of this, that he acted from purely philanthropical motives, and distinctly understood the conquest of Gaul to be a necessary stage of the evolution of humanity. Still his conduct was surely of a nature to be misunderstood by Gaul itself and by the provincials generally. His goodwill towards the non-Roman populations was not so apparent that it could not be mistaken. He stood before them covered with the blood of slaughtered Gauls, an object certainly more pleasing to Rome than to the subjects of Rome. He might not be detested so much as the plundering, peculating proconsuls, but he must have been more feared; and so far from appearing to the provincials a deliverer from the tyranny of Rome, he must have seemed to represent and embody that tyranny in its most irresistible and inexorable form. But perhaps Cæsar had, at some earlier time, identified himself with the provincials; perhaps he had introduced measures calculated to better their condition and enlarge their franchises; perhaps he had expressed disgust at the treatment they met with, and sympathy with their suffering. The answer is, that he had not distinguished himself in any such way. One or two prosecutions of extortionate provincial governors which he had undertaken could not give him any such distinction. Such prosecutions were recognised as the established way by which young men brought themselves into notice, and also as an established way of annoying the Senate. Yet these prose cutions were the only service he hal ever rendered the provinces. In his consulship, at the time when he was the recognised leader of popular legisla tion, he had not appeared as the champion of the provincials, but of quite a different class, whose interests were, if anything, somewhat antagonistic to the interests of the provincials-the poorer class of Roman citizens. Again, if Cæsar was no champion of the provincials, neither was his party, nor those earlier leaders of the party to whose position he had succeeded. Their constituency from the beginning had been a different one. When the great controversy was opened by Tiberius Gracchus, there were in the Roman world, not to count the slaves, three aggrieved classes: first, the poorer class of Roman citizens; secondly, the Italian allies, who had not yet been admitted to the Roman citizenship; thirdly, the provincials. Now if the party which the movement of Gracchus called into existence, and which went on increasing its influence until, in the person of Julius Cæsar, it triumphed over itself and its enemies together, had really been the party of the provincials,-if the Gracchi, and Marius, and Saturninus had been representatives of the interests of the empire as against the interests of the ruling city, they would have taken up the cause of all these aggrieved classes. The Italian allies, and still more the provincials, as the most numerous and the most oppressed class, would have claimed a larger share of their sympathy than the poor Romans. Yet, in fact, none of these leaders had ever said a word about the provincials, except, indeed, to propose that lands taken from them should be granted to Roman colonists. On the Italian allies they had not been altogether silent. Caius Gracchus had even undertaken their cause, but it then appeared clear not only that the party he represented was a different one, but that it was a party decidedly hostile to the Italians. The inclusion of the Italians in the colonization scheme of Marius also, according to Appian, "gave offence to the democracy." The truth is that there had been men in Rome whose liberality was real and comprehensive, but they were not among the democratic leaders, the predecessors of Cæsar. Two men in particular had disregarded party watchwords, and had indulged sympathies not purely Roman. Both of them were aristocrats, and in clined rather to the senatorian than to the popular party. These were Scipio Emilianus and the great Roman Whig Drusus. The former died probably by the hand of an assassin when he was on the point of bringing forward the cause of the Italians. The other succeeded for a moment in effecting a coalition between a section of the noblesse, a section of the people, and the Italians, and was prevented by an accursed dagger from earning a place among the most beneficent statesmen of all history. The Italians forced their way through the pale of citizenship by a war in which the Senate and the democracy were allied in deadly hostility to them. Marius, the uncle and immediate predecessor of Cæsar, fought against them in this war, no less than Sulla, the champion of the aristocracy. When Cæsar appeared upon the scene, therefore, the cause of the Italians was already won, and there remained only two aggrieved classes-the Roman proletariate, crushed for the time by Sulla, and the provincials. Now it was the former, not the latter of these classes of which Cæsar made himself the champion. The provincials, as such, found no champion. Particular misgoverned provinces were from time to time patronized by rhetoricians who were equally ready, as Cicero showed himself, to take a brief from accused and evidently guilty governors; but neither Cæsar, nor any one else, ever raised the cry of justice to the provincials. Except in the case of the Transpadane province-a province only in name, being within the limits of Italy, and already in possession of the inferior or Latin franchise-Cæsar connected himself before the civil war with no measure of enfranchisement, and had given no pledge to the world that any oppressed class except the Roman populace would be the better, or have any reason to be thankful, for his success. No writer of the time regards Cæsar in the light of an emancipator. Cicero gives no hint that Cæsar's partisans defended his conduct on those grounds. That somewhat vacillating politician repeatedly in his letters balances the two parties against |