The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic - Arthur Gilman (top 20 books to read txt) 📗

that Pyrrhus is said to have boasted that if he had such soldiers he could conquer the world, and to have confessed that another such victory would send him back to Epirus alone. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that he sent Cineas to Rome to plead for peace. The Romans were on the point of entering into negotiations, when aged and blind Appius Claudius, hearing of it, caused himself to be carried to the forum, where he delivered an impassioned protest against the proposed action. So effectual was he that the people became eager for war, and sent word to Pyrrhus that they would only treat with him when he should withdraw his forces from Italy. Pyrrhus then marched rapidly towards Rome, but when he had almost reached the city, after devastating the country through which he had passed, he learned that the Romans had made peace with the Etruscans, with whom they had been fighting, and that thus another army was free to act against him. He therefore retreated to winter quarters at Tarentum. The next year the two forces met on the edge of the plains of Apulia, at Asculum, but the battle resulted in no gain to Pyrrhus, who was again obliged to retire for the winter to Tarentum. (B.C. 279.) In the last battle the brunt of the fighting had fallen to the share of the Epirots, and Pyrrhus was not anxious to sacrifice his comparatively few remaining troops for the benefit of the Tarentines. Therefore, after arranging a truce with Rome, he accepted an invitation from the Greeks of Sicily to go to their help against the Carthaginians. For two years he fought, at first with success; but afterwards he met repulses, so that being again asked to assist his former allies in Italy, he returned, in 276, and for two years led the remnants of his troops and the mercenaries that he had attracted to his standard against the Romans. His Italian career closed in the year 274, when he encountered his enemy in the neighborhood of Maleventum, and was defeated, the Romans having learned how to meet the formerly dreaded elephants. The name of this place was then changed to Beneventum. Two years later still, in 272, Tarentum fell under the sway of Rome, which soon had overcome every nation on the peninsula south of a line marked by the Rubicon on the east and the Macra on the west,—the boundaries of Gallia Cisalpina. (_Cis_, on this side, alpina, alpine.) Not only had Rome thus gained power and prestige at home, but she had begun to come in contact with more distant peoples. Carthage had offered to assist her after the battle of Asculum, sending a large fleet of ships to Ostia in earnest of her good faith. Now, when the news of the permanent repulse of the proud king of Epirus was spread abroad, great Ptolemy Philadelphus, the Egyptian patron of art, literature, and science, sent an embassy empowered to conclude a treaty of amity with the republic. The proposition was accepted with earnestness, and ambassadors of the highest rank were sent to Alexandria, where they were treated with extraordinary consideration, and allowed to see all the splendor of the Egyptian capital.

 

Rome had now reached a position of wealth and physical prosperity; the rich had gained much land, and the poor had been permitted to share the general progress; commerce, agriculture, and, to some extent, manufactures had advanced. Rome kept a firm hold upon all of the territory she had won, connecting them with the capital by good roads, but making no arrangements for free communication between the chief cities of the conquered regions. The celebrated military roads, of which we now can see the wonderful remains, date from a later period, with the exception of the Appian Way, which was begun in 312, and, after the conquest of Italy was completed to Brundusium, through Capua, Tres Taberna, and Beneventum. Other than this there were a number of earth roads leading from Rome in various directions. One of the most ancient of these was that over which Pyrrhus marched as far as Præneste, known as the Via Latina, which ran over the Tusculum Hills, and the Alban Mountain. The Via Ostiensis ran down the left bank of the Tiber; the Via Saleria ran up the river to Tibur, and was afterward continued, as the Via Valeria, over the Apennines to the Adriatic.

 

[Illustration: ROMAN STREET PAVEMENT.]

 

The population of Italy (at this time less than three million) was divided into three general classes: first, the Roman Citizens, comprising the members of the thirty-three tribes, stretching from Veii to the river Liris, the citizens in the Roman colonies, and in certain municipal towns; the Latin Name, including the inhabitants of the colonies generally, and some of the most flourishing towns of Italy; and the Allies, or all other inhabitants of the peninsula who were dependent upon Rome, but liked to think that they were not subjects. The Romans had been made rich and prosperous by war, and were ready to plunge into any new struggle promising additional power and wealth.

 

X.

 

AN AFRICAN SIROCCO.

 

All the time that the events that we have been giving our attention to were occurring—that is to say, ever since the foundation of Rome, another city had been growing up on the opposite side of the Mediterranean Sea, in which a different kind of civilization had been developed. Carthage, of which we have already heard, was founded by citizens of Phoenicia. The early inhabitants were from Tyre, that old city of which we read in the Bible, which in the earliest times was famous for its rich commerce. How long the people of Phoenicia had lived in their narrow land under the shadow of great Libanus, we cannot tell, though Herodotus, when writing his history, went there to find out, and reported that at that time Tyre had existed twenty-three hundred years, which would make its foundation forty-five hundred years ago, and more. However that may be, the purple of Tyre and the glass of Sidon, another and still older Phoenician city, were celebrated long before Rome was heard of. It was from this ancient land that the people of Carthage had come. It has been usual for emigrants to call their cities in a new land “new,” (as Nova Scotia, New York, New England, New Town, or Newburg,) and that is the way in which Carthage was named, for the word means, in the old language of the Phoenicians, simply new city, just as Naples was merely the Greek for new city, as we have already seen.

 

[Illustration: A PHOENICIAN VESSEL (TRIREME).]

 

Through six centuries, the people of Carthage had been permitted by the mother-city to attend diligently to their commerce, their agriculture, and to the building up of colonies along the southern coast of the Mediterranean, and the advantages of their position soon gave them the greatest importance among the colonies of the Phoenicians. There was Utica, near by, which had existed for near three centuries longer than Carthage, but its situation was not so favorable, and it fell behind.

Tunes, now called Tunis, was but ten or fifteen miles away, but it also was of less importance. The commerce of Carthage opened the way for foreign conquest, and so, besides having a sort of sovereignty over all the peoples on the northern coast of Africa, she established colonies on Sardinia, Corsica, Sicily, and other Mediterranean islands, and history does not go back far enough to tell us at how early a date she had obtained peaceable possessions in Spain, from the mines of which she derived a not inconsiderable share of her riches.

 

Perhaps it may be thought strange that Carthage and Rome had not come into conflict before the time of which we are writing, for the distance between the island of Sicily and the African coast is so small that but a few hours would have been occupied in sailing across. It may be accounted for by the facts that the Carthaginians attended to their own business, and the Romans did not engage to any extent in maritime enterprises. On several occasions, however, Carthage had sent her compliments across to Rome, though Rome does not appear to have reciprocated them to any great degree; and four formal treaties between the cities are reported, B.C. 509, 348, 306, and 279.

 

It is said that when Pyrrhus, King of Epirus, was about to leave Sicily, he exclaimed: “What a grand arena [Footnote: Arena in Latin meant “sand,” and as the central portions of the amphitheatres were strewn with sand to absorb the blood of the fighting gladiators and beasts, an arena came to mean, as at present, any open, public place for an exhibition. To the ancients, however, it brought to mind the desperate combats to which the thousands of spectators were wont to pay wrapt attention, and it was a much more vivid word than it now is.]

this would be for Rome and Carthage to contend upon!” It did not require the wisdom of an oracle to suggest that such a contest would come at some time, for the rich island lay just between the two cities, apparently ready to be grasped by the more enterprising or the stronger. As Carthage saw the gradual extension of Roman authority over Southern Italy, she realized that erelong the strong arm would reach out too far in the direction of the African continent. She was, accordingly, on her guard, as she needed to be.

 

At about the time of the beginning of the war with Pyrrhus, a band of soldiers from Campania, which had been brought to Sicily, took possession of the town of Messana, a place on the eastern end of the island not far from the celebrated rocks Scylla and Charybdis, opposite Rhegium. Calling themselves Mamertines, after Mars, one form of whose name was Mamers, these interlopers began to extend their power over the island. In their contests with Hiero, King of Syracuse, they found themselves in need of help. In the emergency there was a fatal division of counsel, one party wishing to call upon Rome and the other thinking best to ask Carthage, which already held the whole of the western half of the island and the northern coast, and had for centuries been aiming at complete possession of the remainder. Owing to this want of united purpose it came about that both cities were appealed to, and it very naturally happened that the fortress of the Mamertines was occupied by a garrison from Carthage before Rome was able to send its army.

 

The Roman senate had hesitated to send help to the Mamertines because they were people whom they had driven out of Rhegium, as robbers, six years before, with the aid of the same Hiero, of Syracuse, who was now besieging them. However, the people of Rome, not troubled with the honest scruples of the senate, were, under the direction of the consuls, inflamed by the hope of conquest and of the riches that they expected would follow success, and a war which lasted twenty-three years was the result of their reckless greed (B.C. 264).

 

The result was really decided during the first two years, for the Romans persuaded the Mamertines to expel the Carthaginians from Messana, and then, though besieged by them and by Hiero, drove them both off, and in the year 263 took many Sicilian towns and even advanced to Syracuse. Then Hiero concluded a peace with Rome to which he was faithful to the time of his death, fifty years afterward. The Sicilian city next to Syracuse in importance was Agrigentum, and this the Romans took the next year, thus turning the tables and making themselves instead of the Carthaginians masters of most of